CCleaner, becoming infamous?

Just a basic question : did you try to run Lockhunter on one of those files to see if they were locked by some app ? And to delete manually one of them ?

 

I was able to delete them all, manually. I could have done it with a script or using another app, at that time, but it was faster to manually delete them.

-edit-

Anyway, I'm just going to create a simple PowerShell script to delete all tmp files from the folder.

 

OK, this rules out some kind of lock. Sorry, can't help further, except suggest you try the newest version released today and see if it's still here.

Also, as an alternative, there is DiskMax, but I am not sure you may specify extra folders to be emptied. Diskmax is done to work with as few settings as possible.

 

I have used CCleaner regularly for years, and I use it always before I create a backup image of the system partition.

But the fact is that the Windows installation (7 x64) gets bigger and bigger. One year ago, the average size of the images was about 9.4 GB, now it is 11.1 GB, or 18% increase (average of the imagers I use, with the same compression level).

I doubt that this is only due to the Windows and Office patches. Besides, I have not installed any big application in this period, the system partition doesn´t contain any personal data, and I use Returnil most of the time. It seems that the system "cleaning" is not very effective.

 

Just a thought. Did you check the box entitled "Custom Files and Folders" under "Advanced" in the "Windows" tab? Try clicking the main Cleaner icon (the Brush) and see if that box is checked in the aforementioned section. I don't believe your custom inclusions will be cleaned unless that box is checked.

 

When I saw your post, I asked my self Could this be it? , but no, I do have the box checked.

 

No. It's probably Windows' caching related features that are responsible for the growing.

And that's good.

 

The Secret Of Windows 7 WinSxS Folder

 

Wow, I enjoyed reading that but all three of the authors contradict themselves. One thing that stands out with one of the descriptions is hard linking. That's easy enough to understand but are imaging apps not able to see through smoke and mirrors of hard linking and retain an actual hd image size instead of calculating the ever growing size of winsxs folder which is by explanation, not really as big as it appears? Has anyone ran the VSP1CLN.EXE? Is this different than cleaning up after SP1 from disk cleanup tool?

 

Dang! .....and here I thought I might have nailed it. Frustrating because that feature works just fine for me on all of my machines and you would think, even if nothing else worked 100%, the custom deletion feature would work properly since you're telling the program precisely which files to delete and where those files are located - a no-brainer of sorts.

I even created a new folder on a secondary drive and put some dummy files in it.....files with a .tmp extension as well as others. CCleaner deleted all the .tmp files and left the files with other extensions in place.

 

The attached image shows the variation in time of the size of C partition in this computer (graphics produced by TreeSize). There is a sustained tendency to increase that may be caused by WinSxS, and some spikes.

The big one in February 2011 corresponds to the installation and posterior cleanup of Windows 7 SP1 (with disk cleaning tool). The two recent small ones seem to correspond to installations of Office 2007 SP3, new Nvidia drivers and .NET 4.0.

I use Returnil 90% of the time and I clean regularly with CCleaner and Windows cleaning tool, so I would have expected a more “flat” increase.

 

The winsxs folder actually does typically grow bigger over time. Without hard linking, things would be even worse.

 

I did some checks of my Win 7 x64 winsxs folder size over time.

4/8/10 (2 days after clean installation) 6.2 GB
9/15/10 7.0
3/13/11 (before installation of SP1) 8.0
5/13/11 (after installation of SP1 and SP1 cleanup) 6.4
11/30/11 (today) 7.3

The growth in winsxs size over time isn't as large as I would have guessed.

 

My experience with the CCleaner bug reporting and the forum in general has been hit and miss. If the Piriform team feel it's worth looking into they will, otherwise they'll ignore it. But it's worth a shot. It never hurts to put your eggs in more than one basket though. Just because a forum is dedicated to the app. in question doesn't mean anyone will know the answer to your question.