CCleaner Runs Forever and takes Most of the CPU

CCleaner for Windows CCleaner Windows Bug Reporting
1

Setup: My main day to day laptop was shipped to HP for hinge fixing last week. When I started borrowing my wife's laptop I noticed that CCleaner was not performing the same on her machine as mine. Discovered that CCleaner is running as almost full blast 100% of the time. Seeing as how both machines are almost the same this was a surprise.

Symptoms:

  • SysTray icon flashes 100% of the time.
  • CPU usage of the ccleaner process sits at about 40-50% at all times. If I limit the CPU usage to something less, as in 50% when running on the battery only, ccleaner process will drop to around 15%. This is very consistent.
  • The machines seems quite slow, as would be expected, when governed back, but running it any faster causes the fan to crank up to full speed even when no apps are running. Something (cleaner?) is causing the CPU to spin. I'm not convinced this is all cleaner. I have disabled Cortana weeks ago as it was OBVIOUSLY nuking the machine.
  • The machine has two accounts - we are logged on to both and switch users - I have not seen that the issue goes away when logged onto just one account.
  • When ccleaner is running (all the time) it's hard to get some apps to run. They start slow or won't start at all.

What's been done:

  • Uninstallled and reinstalled ccleaner. No change.
  • Exit ccleaner and restarted it. This does temporarily stop the constant cleaning, but as soon as any browser is opened and closed the CPU usage goes up and flashing icon resumes.
  • I have left it up and running for hours, with the idea that ccleaner needs to do a full scan at least once and it's taking a long time. How long is too long? Eight hours? Y'all tell me.

Since I don't have my main laptop to compare I don't know if this is a recent upgrade/version issue or something specific to this laptop. This was not an issue on that laptop as of the middle of last week.

System:

  • Windows 10 Anniversary Update.
  • 8GB RAM (about 3GB in use)
  • Cleaner V5.23.5808 (64bit)

2

Hi Kelly and welcome to the forums,

was this also happening with the prior CC version?

it sounds like you have Monitoring turned on (do you have the Pro edition?), have you tried turning that feature off?

and just from a maintenance side of things, wouldn't hurt to start the machine in Safe Mode (hold down Shift when you tell Win10 to restart) and manually run CCleaner and Defraggler - just to get the PC lean and clean and seeing if that helps.

3

Yes, I have the pro version. Have I tried turning off monitoring? No.

I have no clue if it was happening with the previous version. This is my wife’s machine. Silent update is enabled, so I don’t know when updates are taking place. All II know is it was happening on this machine when I borrowed it when the other laptop was sent back to HP for repairs. I will be able to compare versions on the other laptop when it comes back as CCleaner has always worked well on that machine. Seems the update that others have said is causing problems came out after that laptop was gone.

I did notice that it was working as expected earlier yesterday when logged into my wife's account, but not when logged into mine. So, two accounts on the same machine are not working the same.

The CCleaner settings for each user account were NOT set to the same. One user account setting said "All users" while the the other said "Current user only"

I changed all settings to be the same - "All users" with everything as defaults, except turned on cleaning when exiting the browser WITH notification so there would be something to tell me it was working.

Rebooted

Even though "Skip User Account Control warning" was/is enable it still pops the security dialog after a reboot, every time.

As is typical for these things...HA! ... It is no longer spinning/working. It doesn't seem to be working at all. The process is using 0% CPU and only 6 Megs of memory. Opening and closing the browsers no longer instigates cleaning.

This is frustrating to debug since it seems to be either working all the time or not working at all.

I’m trying to be vigilant and aware of what I’m doing, what the settings are, when it gets stuck working/spinning. So far nothing is obvious. I strongly suspect CCleaner was confused with the multiple users, at least a little, but what I changed to make to go from working to not working is unknown.

As a last comment, it seems to work fine sometimes after a reboot and when logged into just one account. Trouble may be instigated when switching users, being logged in with both users (or not logged out as the case may be).

4

Got my main laptop back yesterday. CCleaner is working fine on it. V5.20.5668 currently installed. (suspect it will be updated soon) We'll see if there are any regressions post update.

Followup on my wife’s laptop: It’s not hit the situation where it ‘cleans’ continually since I set both user accounts to have matching ccleaner settings. (may not be the real reason of course) The original issue of this post seems fixed or worked around for a week now…since using matching settings and changing them to be for “All users”.

One new clue/issue has become apparent – If all browser instances from all users are not closed then CCleaner will not clean at all for any users. So, if my wife has logged on and left her browser up, then I switch users to my account I will never see CCleaner work. The workaround is to switch back to her account, close any instances of browsers open or log her off, then switch back to my account and close any browsers still open. CCleaner will kick in and do what it should.

While this may seem logical since CCleaner is indeed working ok, it was unexpected since I can't (and shouldn't) log onto her account to close her browsers (nor she mine). It's possible that other users that are having issues with ccleaner not seeing to work could be setting up similar scenarios on their machines.

Of course I can't see if this scenario is inhibiting any background tasks, but with notifications/prompts turned on for some it does seem they are not working unless just one of us is actually logged on. The only way to know this is a fact is of I know there should be a prompt and there wasn't (like cleaning when losing the browsers)

In hindsight this may very well be related to the setting ccleaner to be "all users" - one of the changes made that may have worked around the 'runs forever' issue.