Running CCleaner Pro Broke My Brave and Firefox Browsers

After signing up for CClean Pro and activating, I ran a number of programs:

Healthcheck, Performance Optimizer, Custom Clean, Driver Updater, and Registry. 


I have been using the free CCleaner application for a number of years. 


This time with CCleaner Pro, however, I seem to have damaged two of my four browsers: 


Brave and Firefox.  If I leave the browser temporarily to do another task, when I return, 


the browser has become unresponsive.  Sometimes the tabs that are already open will work, 


sometimes not.  New tabs typically do not work.  Sometimes they'll say "Crash" if I hover 


the cursor;  mostly they refuse to accept a new URL by simply blanking it out. Do you 


suppose Performance Optimization caused this by forcing a necessary background process 


to sleep????? ... or what?  I stopped all Brave processes, uninstalled it, and then 


went looking for any leftover folders and files. I deleted them all until there was no 


trace.  Also ran the register cleanup.  Then I reinstalled Brave.  Same thing.  Still 


doesn't work. I have to kill it and restart all the tabs I was working on.

Google Chrome / Chromium Based Browsers:

As for all Chromium based browsers it nuked Comodo Dragon so bad (over a decade ago on my old XP PC) it never worked correct afterwards and even a clean re-install didn't work. I found out that certain browser profile folders located in sub-folders named 'Extension State' and 'Local Extension Settings' had to be excluded. I exclude both whole folder locations in any Chromium browsers profile folder after the Comodo Dragon incident and it hasn't broken a Chromium based browser since then for 12 years. They can be excluded in CCleaner at 'Options > Exclude'.

Example using Microsoft Edge Chromium I exclude these two paths (in Windows 10):

* C:\Users\UserProfileName\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Edge\User Data\Default\<strong><span style="color:#c0392b;">Extension State</span></strong>


* C:\Users\UserProfileName\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Edge\User Data\Default\<strong><span style="color:#c0392b;">Local Extension Settings</span></strong>

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Mozilla Firefox / Firefox Based Browsers:

This info is many years old however after having it brick a Firefox profile I always have these disabled/unticked in CCleaner under the Firefox section so that it never cleans them:

* <strong><span style="color:#c0392b;">Session</span></strong>


* <span style="color:#c0392b;"><strong>Site Preferences</strong></span> (this is possibly the most important one)

I also have it exclude various things in Firefox (Firefox Portable ESR is what I use), this is primarily because of what I mentioned in the Chromium based browsers comment for paranoia's sake - now rather these are necessary in Firefox I don't know, but I'm not taking any chances:

..\PortableApps\FirefoxPortableESR\Data\profile\*\|<span style="color:#c0392b;"><strong>*.sqlite-shm</strong></span>;<span style="color:#c0392b;"><strong>*.sqlite-wal</strong></span>


..\PortableApps\FirefoxPortableESR\Data\profile\<span style="color:#c0392b;"><strong>browser-extension-data</strong></span>

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Edit:

If you use the community Winapp2.ini file (https://community.ccleaner.com/topic/32310-winapp2ini-additions/#comments) that might possibly clean too much.

Edit 2:

You must use Custom Clean in CCleaner in order for it to honor exclusions, and not clean what you've disabled/unticked! If you have it just automatically clean it doesn't use any user preferences.