Before anything else, I should mention that I haven't worked help desk in over 5 years.
Back when I worked help desk, the most common reason for a completely FUBAR and need a re-install was that the user ran CCleaner on it.
Back when I worked help desk, the most common reason for a completely FUBAR and need a re-install was that the user ran CCleaner on it.
That doesn't mean CCleaner's behavior is correct, but it's probably a situation the developers haven't been able to test against. For what it's worth, I've run CCleaner's registry cleaner on dozens of machines and never had a problem of any type, and I still use CCleaner sometimes because it's a simple way to clean the temp/junk files left by many common applications with one button click.
I always feel a little nervous when I run the registry cleaner, and while I haven't noticed any problems, I also haven't noticed a meaningful improvement after running it either. I should probably stop doing it just for that reason.
So reading between the lines, you're saying that CCleaner is a bad idea simply because they cannot possibly understand the registry well enough to make the changes that they're making.
We agree completely.
Honestly if people want to use CCleaner to do jump lists, file history, and caches (although that last one is misguided) then I'm all for it. There's very little chance anything will break with those (it is hard to screw up!).
I just warn against the registry cleaner primarily, and just feel like with Disk Cleaner and Windows' automatic cleaning that has been integrated for a while you could live without using CCleaner (unless you still have a Windows 9x box).
It sounds more like, "the software vendor is doing incorrect or incomplete things with the registry and CCleaner cannot possibly know that."
As a long-time Windows software developer, I've been stunned at how sloppy desktop programs and installers are, even today. People ignore Microsoft guidelines, somehow get the software to the "works for me" stage, and deploy it.