How to ruin a useful program that people loved and used it for years you ask? Look no further than CCleaner’s newest update xD
They turned it into an unusable bloatware. I was using CCleaner for over 15 years. But the newest update is very useless: I’m unable to deactivate CCleaner from starting with boot. Making it unable to deactivate autostart makes it a bloatware, when I don’t use it. I don’t want it to run as a background app. I don’t want it to start with windows. I tried running it and I tried scanning but it didn’t even work. Where are the tools like the registry cleaner? I can’t start the registry cleaner tool. Before the update, I was using that frequently. What happened to it?
I can’t even use the functions CCleaner normally has and I wasn’t even able to use CCleaner for what it’s intended in the first place, scanning for files… This new update stinks to hell and they butchered the app for no reason and now I uninstalled it: Oh yeah, I couldn’t even uninstall it the normal way because the setup manager was stuck at 95% and didn’t progress any further, so I had to delete it manually…. RIP CCleaner. You were very useful before this update
Same here. CC cleaner tries to FORCE users to run the first scan. The first scan window covers the main interface, and there is no way to skip it. Then surprise in the startup manager and settings no way to disable CCC starting on boot.
This update has turned trusted software into what looks and feels like a scam. Thanks for a decade of good service, I was considering paying with Win 11, but today instead I’ve had to uninstall.
Ccleaner 7 can be neutered - you have to write a small front-end for it that changes the service from disabled to enabled and then starts the service, and then on termination disable and stop its scheduled task.
Can you elaborate? I would appreciate it. I really don’t want CCleaner running as service continuously.
Also, I’m not sure why CCleaner hasn’t made this an option that can be selected by the user without having to go into Service and set it to disabled (WHICH BREAKS THE PROGRAM).
Here is a simple batch script - see if you can follow what it’s doing. It needs to be run as administrator.
So you save it to a file like “ccleaner.bat” and then you either right-click on it and choose Run as Administrator OR you create a shortcut to it that has Run as Administrator turned on.
Let’s see if I get hammered by the moderators/rules for posting this!
rem Check for Administrator privileges
if not exist C:\Windows\System32\WDI\LOGFILES (
echo.
set /p "=This utility must be Run as Administrator - press any key to exit " nul
goto :EOF
)
echo.
echo Starting CCleaner . . .
rem Enable and Start the CCleaner service
sc config ccleaner7 start=auto >nul
sc start ccleaner7 >nul
rem Launch CCleaner
start “” “C:\Program Files\Piriform\CCleaner 7\CCleaner.exe”
echo.
set /p "=Return to this window and press any key to terminate CCleaner " nul
rem put this here so it displays for a few seconds before the window closes
echo.
echo.
echo CCleaner Terminated
rem Disable and Stop the CCleaner service
sc config ccleaner7 start=disabled >nul
sc stop ccleaner7 >nul
rem Disable and End the CCleaner Scheduled Task(s)
for /f “tokens=1 delims=,” %%A in (‘schtasks /query /fo csv /nh ^| findstr /i “ccleaner”’) do (
schtasks /change /tn %%A /disable >nul
schtasks /end /tn %%A >nul
)
rem Terminate Ccleaner (including trayicon)
taskkill /f /im ccleaner* >nul
One reason i love this community is we got peeps like this who go the extra mile, now if someone could only figure out custom cleaning rules and an abilty to clean browser traces at browser close
We’ve never censored usage for ccleaner, why would we, some of us also don’t like the running service (i think I’m the minority with my theory that a service has a smaller footprint than a full exe load for a monitor).
But imho the service should be opt in for monitoring and not cripple the running of ccleaner if you disable/manual it
While the first post from “Krassior” lays out all the issues and concerns I have, “jaddorf” states it most succinctly! After 20+ years of using CCleaner, and recommending it to ALL my clients, I’m going to have to bail and find something else for my needs. Too bad. Some manager on CCleaner team should get 30 lashes with a wet noodle.
I just copied and pasted my script - these lines don’t seem to paste correctly so you’ll need to manually edit them so that they look like the script I posted. This website seems to have changed my double-quotes to smart quotes in several places, and that don’t work.
Very interesting but most people wouldn’t be able to do this
In the end, CCleaner sucks now and we consumers shouldn’t have to do these scripts for the program to run like it should
THIS program was great at one time.
They decided to make a Web Browser which
hijacked the Bookmarks from Firefox.The owner
is 83, and I am helping, HOURS Spent..That you CCleaner for
NOTHING
If you suspect that CCleaner v7.0x has damaged / corrupted the owner’s Firefox bookmarks then you might find some helpful information in suej’s 03-Sep-2025 topic Lost bookmarks. Avast / Piriform has known about this problem for over 4 months and has done nothing about it.
Custom cleaning rules are easily implemented with some pretty minor changes but CCleaner’s service complicates installing them and occasionally will overwrite them.
I’ve created a tool which converts a custom ruleset to be CCleaner 7 compatible and then installs it into CCleaner 7 but I haven’t gotten around to releasing it because a different problem sits in my way.
Wonderful to hear you’ve been working at it. So (at this time) updates (or maybe service restart) rewrite the rules section of ccleaner.ini? (1) if so I’ll put a note in the idea blackhole, err portal I mean, asking this to change, they obviously are interested why else add the author tag.
(1) I offhandedly wonder if this is why ccleaner’s service occasionally, in the background, makes a tcp conection to a Google cloud server (with all privacy options unchecked and cloud cleaner not used)
I really want the CCleaner team to understand what happened after the release of version 7: The reason we started using CCleaner is that we desperately, even obsessively, wanted to reclaim system resources to maximize performance - So, when CCleaner itself just sits there, taking up its own share of resources after the cleaning job is finished, it feels… really wrong… painful even.
It is as if CCleaner no longer understands its market. How can they try to sell us a cleaning product that will always leave a stain?
I have been using {Competition software removed) on Linux, and am switching to that on Windows as well now. This is after years of being a rather happy CCleaner client (my community account here is new, because I just created it so that I could join this discussion. Again, it is important that CCleaner understand what is going on).
