Wipe Free Space problmes

ok I have a 500 gb hard drive with vista and I have been running ccleaner for over 24 hours and it says the wipe free space is at 100% and has been for over 6 hours. how long does it take to finsh after that. I am afraid to hit cancel. any ideas and what can I do

Tia, this seems to be occurring to many users. You are correct to have a bit of worry about canceling where it is now, and if you do so the first thing you'll notice is your drive has lost a huge amount of free space. What Wipe Freespace has done is it has created a huge temporary file at the root of the wiped drive. Many users have found that if they cancel The wipe and then go and permanently delete the file (Shift+Delete) they gain their freespace back. I do not know if this is the currently accepted action and you may wish to wait for another user/moderator to sound off as well (Esp. Davey, Hazelnut, or Dennis).

The following is a Note more aimed toward the developers:

As you can see This new feature "wipe free space" has caused a GREAT number of issues. Many are like this poster's where it gets "stuck" at 100% I believe that this is due to Windows' issues with Deleting overly large files.

Two way I can see to get around this:

1) Many Freespace wipers make a number of smaller Temp files instead of rolling the wiped space into one overly sized file (sometimes 500+GB). This may stop this from occurring in the "frozen state"

2) Remove Freespace wipe. Look, I know people cried and cried for it, but many of us "power users" and forum frequenters called this a unnecessary addition to CCleaner and one that would end up causing issues (as it has). We love cCleaner for it's simplicity and, while we are glad that the addition of this feature means the developers at Piriform are listening to their forum members (something not often seen in the freeware world), this just doesn't fit with cCleaner's purpose; Maybe Defraggler's, maybe Recuva's, maybe even as it's own product (though in any of these cases my first suggestion should come to mind).

See this post made by MrRon today

http://forum.piriform.com/index.php?s=&amp...st&p=131482