6 replies to this topic

[Hapkido]

For the past 3 versions (currently running 1.30.310) the results after running the "Issues" section, a group of strange "Unused File Extension" entries show up in the result. I can run the scan several times immediately after each other and the same items appear after "fixing" them. They don't appear to be in the Registry so I have to conclude this is a "bug", albeit one that might be isolated on my particular system. (XP SP-2).

My machine is squeaky clean otherwise. I've attached a screenshot of the Issues scan results of those items below.

 ccleaner.gif   6.3K   166 downloads

[DjLizard]

Oh. CCleaner doesn't support Unicode. You'll have to go into the registry yourself to delete those (Start > Run > regedit). It's probably a corrupted key. Also, it won't look like a few question marks and a square when you get in there, so look carefully. If you find something funny looking in HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT, post a screenshot before you remove anything.

[Hapkido]

DjLizard, on Jun 17 2006, 12:25 PM, said:

Oh. CCleaner doesn't support Unicode. You'll have to go into the registry yourself to delete those (Start > Run > regedit). It's probably a corrupted key. Also, it won't look like a few question marks and a square when you get in there, so look carefully. If you find something funny looking in HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT, post a screenshot before you remove anything.

Thanks for replying. And fyi, I'm a System Administrator so fear not that I'll delete something that I shouldn't from the Registry. The problem in CCleaner is that using the "Open in Regedit" item on the context menu takes you nowhere. In other words, it appears that these 8 items do not actually exist in the Registry. I did a scan of the Registry using one of my favorite utilities, Registry Crawler, looking for anomalies and the only thing I could find was these 8 items (see screenshot), but they aren't "file extensions" but "default icons", all but 2 belong to IconPackager icons and the remaining two point to the "shimgvw.dll" in WINDOWS, which is used mainly by Windows Picture and Fax Viewer. Other than that, everything looked fine.

 ccleaner2.gif   4.07K   125 downloads

[DjLizard]

CCleaner can't take you there, because again, it doesn't support Unicode (and it thus cannot read the entries correctly). The entries do exist, but CCleaner can't properly display them - the NT 5 registry is fully Unicode but supports most non-Unicode functions. So, CCleaner is able to see that something is there, but it can't display it properly - instead it splits the Unicode into two separate bytes, and displays ASCII, question marks, or boxes, to replace the characters with a value higher than 255.

Is this a screenshot from Registry Crawler? From a first glance, it looks as though it doesn't support Unicode either (shame, considering that the registry is fully Unicode). You'll have to use regedit.exe to find these problems. Since they are corrupted, there is no harm in deleting them, but you won't be able to delete them from programs that don't support Unicode.

[Hapkido]

DjLizard, on Jun 17 2006, 07:45 PM, said:

Is this a screenshot from Registry Crawler? From a first glance, it looks as though it doesn't support Unicode either (shame, considering that the registry is fully Unicode). You'll have to use regedit.exe to find these problems. Since they are corrupted, there is no harm in deleting them, but you won't be able to delete them from programs that don't support Unicode.

Actually, no..... the screenshot is from RegEditX, which is like "regedit" on steroids. If you aren't familiar with it, I would highly recommend it to you. It's a free utility. I use the complimentary program "Registry Crawler" (not free but very cheap) to search for items in the Registry as it is simply the best utility I have found for such purposes. It too is on steroids.

Anyway, I went ahead and exported those 8 keys and then deleted them. I then ran CCleaner and they no longer show up. Windows Fax and Picture Viewer was not affected either, which was my main concern.

Thanks for your help. It is much appreciated.

[DjLizard]

Okay, then it was being properly displayed, but there were no glyphs assigned to the characters being displayed (or they were super-low ASCII). Can you attach the .reg file you exported (as a file, not as pasted text)? I want to see what values those chars really were.

[Hapkido]

DjLizard, on Jun 17 2006, 10:39 PM, said:

Can you attach the .reg file you exported (as a file, not as pasted text)? I want to see what values those chars really were.

I would like to oblige you but unfortunately I deleted the exported files. The values for the "Default icon" key were legitimate paths to specific icons contained in the respective IconPackager ".icl" files (themes). But the keys themselves were exactly as the screenshot shows.