First off, I'm on a PC running Windows 7 and I am using CCleaner v3.25.1872. I've used CCleaner for years happily and without incident, however, yesterday I noticed that most of my files (mainly .xls and .pdf files) in my Documents Library folder had been, to all appearances, corrupted. Each one had a "date modified" value that was almost identical (within two minutes) to all the others. The time coincided exactly with the time the previous night that I had run CCleaner. I had ran a full virus scan (with Avast) two days prior and have run two since, including a boot-time scan with no virus found in any scan. Thus, with us all keeping an open mind, is it possible that CCleaner somehow damaged them/made them unusable? To forestall at least one question, I had not changed any of the settings I use for CCleaner prior to the incident. Thanks in advance to any constructive comment. The damage is done, though thankfully it is not great, but I am concerned about the possibility of a repeat performance.
Firstly your version of ccleaner is out of date, we are now up to version 4.10
http://www.piriform.com/ccleaner/builds
It seems unlikely that if everything was the same that ccleaner caused the corruption, but then again we aren't aware of all the facts and details.
Were you able to restore any of your files using the 'previous versions'?
http://windows.microsoft.com/en-gb/windows/previous-versions-files-faq#1TC=windows-7
Thanks for the reply. Most of the pdf files have been restored (all but one, in fact), but the Excel files are a bit trickier. I can't say that CCleaner is to blame, but it's a hell of a coincidence that all of the affected files were modified at a time that CCleaner is know to have been running. I'll put it this way: remember the old movies were the dastardly villain ties the damsel to the railroad tracks? Well, CCleaner might not have been the villain, but it sure seems as if it were the train. To put it another way, maybe there was some other problem that occurred with my computer that allowed or caused CCleaner to affect all those files, but it sure seems to me that it must have. In the interest of completeness, I will mention that I also noticed that very night that four of my desktop icons were blank. I recreated the shortcuts by hand and didn't think too much of it until the next morning when I couldn't open any of the affected files. As far as having a more current version of CCleaner goes, every time I update it, it seems to get worse, frankly. Thanks again.
Did you do a registry clean before your problem or was it just an 'ordinary' clean?
I tend to avoid messing with the registry, so it was just a plain ol' ordinary cleaning with the default settings. As many times as I've used CCleaner, I find it kind of hard to believe myself, but for the (exact) timing of the problem. Given what CCleaner actually cleans and what it doesn't, is there any way for it to misidentify files or for some computer/operating system glitch to allow files that shouldn't be cleaned to be cleaned by CCleaner? I ask because I do remember something a bit out of the ordinary when I ran the test. Normally I hit "analyze", wait for it to complete, then hit clean. Well, I did just that, but as I was hitting clean I did notice an unusually large amount of data for one of the "categories" (for lack of a better word) in the summary results. I didn't think much of it at the time, nor do I remember any specifics other than that it was an unusually large amount of data. Anyway, as it usually takes a good while to clean my system, I didn't stick around and wait for CCleaner to finish, so I don't know how long the cleaning took, either (are there logs for CCleaner?). Regardless, thanks for the responses. I don't know if I'll ever know what really happened (my cat WAS near the computer at the time of the incident, so....) but I do know I sure don't want it to happen again.
I guess that you keep Avast signatures up to date.
It is known for such protective software to take an interest in CCleaner activities and to slow things down.
It has been known for such software to disinfect or quarantine or even delete system files due to defects in a signature update.
I do not see any reason for Avast to corrupt your files, or to change the modify dates,
BUT whenever CCleaner is looking inside your folders to seek and destroy,
your protection may also be closely observing with a view to intercepting CCleaner actions.
I think CCleaner looks at the names of files, but not the content, and if it went wrong it would delete - not corrupt or modify.
Some Antivirus tools have the ability to "disinfect" a file,
and an erroneous signature update might cause the A.V. to "disinfect" and thus modify and corrupt files.
Does Avast have such a capability ?
Files mysteriously becoming corrupt for no apparent reason would having me immediately running a tool like Microsoft Windows Memory Diagnostic using the full Extended tests option, and I'd follow that up doing a full scan with ChkDsk.