I have a question about wiping all traces of CCleaner Free Portable off my system. Are there any locations (other than those mentioned below) I should be looking to find remnants of CCleaner Free Portable?
I have a Win 10 v22H2 OS and currently run CCleaner Free Portable v6.30.11385 from removable USB stick with Options | Advanced | Save All Settings to INI File enabled. I have never installed a “regular” version of CCleaner Free or Pro on the hard drive of this machine.
I’ve re-read Wiswiz’s Welcome Back to CCleaner Professional ??? and based on assorted comments in that topic I would need to manually delete the following at a minimum:
All CCleaner-related files on my USB stick (i.e., in my E:\Portable\CCleaner folder where the ccsetup6xx.zip file is unzipped)
The registry key at HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Piriform\CCleaner (currently containing 57 registry values)
The registry key at HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\Piriform\CCleaner (currently containing 3 registry values)
All CCleaner-related tasks in Task Scheduler (currently CCleanerCrashReporting and CCleanerSkipUAC)
A further search of my registry (Keys only, Values and Data excluded) for “Piriform” turned up one additional key (i.e., Computer\HKEY_USERS\S-1-5-21-2569989150-381581819-3085879003-1001\SOFTWARE\Piriform) but it was empty (Name = Default, no value set) which I’ll likely ignore.
I did not find any CCleaner files that included the words “CCleaner” or “Piriform” in C:\Program Files or C:\Program Files (x86), presumably because CCleaner has never been installed on the hard drive of my system. I found two files created on 02-Sep-2020 in the hidden C:\ProgramData in a subfolder called C:\ProgramData\Intel\ShaderCache (CCleaner64_0 and CCleaner64_1, no file extensions) which I’ll likely ignore since it doesn’t look like they were created by CCleaner Free Portable itself.
When I searched the hidden C:\Users<myusername>\AppData I found a few shortcuts and mail attachments (.png files) that included the word “CCleaner” but, again, nothing that seemed to be created by CCleaner Free Portable itself.
Thanks for the suggestion, but I didn’t find any match for “Avast” or “Norton” that appears to be related to CCleaner Free Portable in my registry or in any of the locations on my hard drive I mentioned <above> (e.g., C:\Program Files, C:\Users<myusername>\AppData, etc.).
I did find two references to NortonSystemInfo under registry keys for Microsoft DirectDraw (Computer\HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\DirectDraw\Compatibility\NortonSystemInfo and Computer\HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\WOW6432Node\Microsoft\DirectDraw\Compatibility\NortonSystemInfo), but this DirectX component has been obsolete since the release of Direct3D. Again, I’ll likely leave these registry keys alone since it looks like they have nothing to do with CCleaner Free Portable itself.
I searched all my registry keys from the root (Computer) and didn’t find any further matches for “Piriform” or “CCleaner” or “Avast” or “Norton”. However, I have a 64-bit OS and whenever I updated CCleaner Free Portable I unzipped the zip file (e.g., ccsetup6xx.zip) and deleted every file and subfolder folder except CCleaner64.exe, portable.dat and License.txt (and kept the ccleaner.ini configuration settings file from my previous version), so I never ran the 32-bit CCleaner.exe executable.
Here’s an image I captured of my E:\Portable\CCleaner directory back in May 2024 for CCleaner v6.23 after unwanted program files were manually deleted:
NOTE: The \Log and \Setup subfolders are automatically created the first time CCleaner64.exe is launched. You must keep the \Lang subfolder if you use a non-English interface. Deleting the \x64 and \x86 folders will remove Driver Updater and Software Updater, which I never used.
