Hello. After you performed a major update to CCleaner, it stopped working correctly. Previously, after scanning, if it found 10 GB of files, it deleted 10 GB of files. Now it conditionally finds 10 GB again but deletes a few megabytes at a time. I thought maybe you need to run CCleaner with admin rights, but that didn’t work. I read the topics on the forum, support says that the files are busy with other processes and therefore may not be deleted, but before it was deleted without problems. I don’t see any point in this program. If this is not fixed, I will no longer continue the subscription.
Hi @Jordan43221,
There are two main reasons CCleaner 7 may report unable to clean on some cleaning items:
1. Browser files being locked When Chrome, Edge, or Firefox is open — or even running as a background process after you’ve closed the window — their database files (history, cookies, cache, etc.) are locked by the browser. CCleaner can’t delete locked files, so it skips them and counts them as “unable to clean.”
To fix this:
-
Close all your browsers fully before running a clean
-
Open Task Manager → Details tab and check for any remaining
chrome.exe,msedge.exe, orfirefox.exeprocesses, and end them if present -
When CCleaner shows the “Close these running programs?” dialog, click Close programs rather than Skip
-
Then re-run the clean
2. Windows system files being locked Some Windows system files — like Temporary Files, Event Trace Logs, and Thumbnail Cache — are actively being written to by Windows services. These can’t be deleted while in use, and CCleaner will skip them rather than risk a conflict. This is expected behaviour and not something admin rights can change, which is why running as admin didn’t help.
CCleaner will still clean everything it can — what you’re seeing in those cases is the app being accurate rather than aggressive, which is the intended change in CCleaner 7.
If you have any questions please message me back
Thanks for the answer. I understand that in order to clean files, you need to close programs that can use them. When CCleaner offers to close them, I always close them. I have been using CCleaner for over 10 years and I understand how it works perfectly, it has always suited me. But with version 7, it is absolutely useless for me. To check if the old version was better, I found the installer of version 6, installed it, logged in, did a search, it found 16+GB of files, and deleted them without any problems. Therefore, as long as version 6 works, I will use it, and if it stops working, I will have to look for other cleaning options.
