Cleaning stopped working after design update

CCleaner for Windows
2

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, or firefox.exe processes, 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