Ccleaner and “hot fix uninstaller” tick box

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On my XP machine I have recently installed Ccleaner. I ticked the “hot fix uninstaller” box to see what it showed. It identified 2418 files totalling 687MB. I have googled to see what hot fixes are eg http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/itproxpsp/thread/8c66e542-ba3e-444a-bcef-1710213e32c5/ and http://www.wangarific.com/what-are-hotfix-uninstallers/ and a few others.

In C:/Windows I can see 373 files with phrases like uninstall in the name. If those are the target files that still leaves 2100 somewhere. Where might they be?

Before doing anything I am looking for any advice/comments. Eg leave alone, remove a few at a time, etc. I would make a restore point before embarking on a removal.

Brian

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Which version of Ccleaner?

I don’t have that option in the latest version (3.17), but I can find references to a serious mistake in earlier versions with respect to hotfix uninstallers.

Bruce

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I have that (unchecked by default) option in XP SP3, CC ver. 3.17.1689, it’s something I’ve used on many PC’s on an irregular basis. I last used it quite recently on my own laptop and have never seen any ill effects or oddities that may have been caused by removing them. There’s still in excess of 1GB of other $* folders left.

It isn’t shown in CC my W7 PC.

The problem mentioned in that link was fixed over 6 years ago.

If the space is needed (and you really need in excess of 25% free space to keep a reasonable speed), I’d backup the files somewhere safe and remove the older folders first to test.

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Bruce

I was using 3.16.1666 and I note the url pointing to a possible error.

I updated to 3.17 and the hot fix uninstaller is still present.

Satrow

Thanks for your comments on it being a problem from 2006.

I do not really have problem with space. Looking at Ccleaner in detail followed from AVG taking around 40 minutes to run a scan – only operating systems applications were running. I removed
Temporary Internet files (46,596 totalling 396,853KB)
System – Temporary files (8,207 totalling 795,491KB)
Windows log files (439 totalling 47,648KB)
Firefox/Mozilla – Internet cache (18,410 totalling 818,677KB)
and a few others.
To cut a long story short there were 75406 files totaling 2,324,743KB (it really was 2.324GB).

I have run three AVG scans since those removals and the average time is 20 minutes 42 seconds.

I will take your precautionary approach of backing up the folders up, before removal, in case it all goes wrong.

Brian

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To the best of my knowledge the hot fix uninstall option removes all the files that would be needed if you want to uninstall one of the Microsoft patches. After they have been installed a while it seems pointless to me to keep them. I normally tick this option when I use C cleaner.

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