Dave CCleaner

If you have been using CCleaner for a while you will have noticed that every CCleaner notification has some form of dismissal option to close it and move on to the next thing. However, these will vary depending on the nature and content of the notification - it may be an "X" button, an "Accept/Decline" option, a "Continue" button, or a "no thanks" or "remind me later" button. And most have a CCleaner configuration setting to switch them off. Hard to give more specific suggestions for a remedy in your case without some more information about the notification that you received (screenshots are always handy for this sort of thing), so could you please clarify: What was the content of the notification? (eg: was it telling you that there was a update to CCleaner to download, that you had just updated your copy of CCleaner, that Smart Cleaning could clean your browser after it closed, that there is currently a discount sale on CCleaner Professional, etc?) Where did the notification appear on your screen? (bottom right corner, inside the CCleaner console itself, or some other location?) Is this a notification that you have been receiving regularly? Or just once or twice? Is the nature of your concern that this is a type of notification that you do not wish to receive? Or that the X/close/decline/no thanks/remind me later/etc option did not render on your screen? If the latter, could you describe your monitor setup - eg: screen resolution, if you are using multiple monitors, if the Windows taskbar on your main monitor has been moved to somewhere other than the default bottom location, if your Windows taskbar has been "fattened" to be two or more icons deep instead of the usual one, etc.

As the CCleaner 5.64 sunset release for XP/Vista was released over 2 years ago, that would seem rather unlikely. Someone on here may be able to assist with your problem - but would need more information. How long have you been using 5.64 for on that particular machine? If this issue started recently, are there any changes that you have made to this computer at around the same time? Are you running any antivirus software that may have updated itself? Which Service Pack version of Windows XP are you running, and is it the "MIcrosoft official" version or a community maintained service pack. Given the age of the computer, hardware failure is also a possibility. have you done a CHKDSK recently?

When reading VirusTotal results it is important to know how to interpret them - especially as the different engines each have their own method of reporting their results. In the case of McAfee, for example, Artemis is not the name of any virus, but rather the name of their own threat detection engine. Any file flagged with "Artemis" by McAfee has not been identified as a threat, but rather as a binary that they have not yet properly analysed. So the result of "Artemis!C49DC30B0BB7" - basically just means that McAfee (or at least what McAfee is sharing with VirusTotal) is running a bit behind at the moment and doesn't know what it is yet.

On the free version, after you update (either manually or automatically) then after the post-update confirmation screen it might ask you if you want to buy today. On average, happens every 2-3 months. If there is a sale on then you might see a pop-up asking if you'd like to take advantage of the current discounted offer to buy. Last sale was in January, so probably another one before the end of March. Depending on the sale, the offer may appear only once or (during Black Friday, for example, a couple of times). ... unless you tell CCleaner to pretend it has not seen the message before. Unless you really love hearing from us every day, we recommend against doing that. ... and then you don't get any offers. If you were never going to buy then there's no point in showing you offers. If you do plan to buy and switch off the offers then you'll end up paying us more. So having that setting available is a win-win ;-) However, if you are using the free version and try clicking on a padlocked paid feature of CCleaner Professional then naturally it is not going to let you use it - it will generally give you the option to try it out for free as part of a 15 day (no credit card) trial though. Good decision - that's the emergency updater. That's our fire alarm if, for example, Windows releases an update that will cause serious problems with older CCleaner versions. Standard updates are handled by CCleaner itself - which it sounds like you might still be blocking with CFA. If you want to control this in a more elegant fashion, I would recommend using the Options > Updates setting in CCleaner itself.

As with most subscriptions, you can cancel future billings at any time - which means that the service will terminate at the end of the current paid term unless you remember to make a manual payment. So yes you can unsubscribe now (there is a link to do so in the order confirmation email) and you would still have full use of the product until the expiration date. Either way you'd receive notifications before expiry with offers to renew at a discounted rate.

It is quite possible that MS never was detecting it. Even if not on the "naughty list" AV clients will often ding any unknown binaries until they are whitelisted. Generally, most AV vendors respond pretty quickly to new CCleaner releases, but every now and then there is a lag of a day or two with one vendor or another - which is increased if the client's blacklist/whitelist is left out of date for while. Indeed that tends to sort it out nicely ;-) I don't think any of us can forget that. Noteworthy that the compromise itself happened on Piriform's old development environment infrastructure before it was brought under the Avast umbrella, and manifested itself while the transition was still going on. Everything got quite the overhaul in late 2017 after that. In late 2019/early 2020 CCleaner had its longest ever gap between releases when we moved to Avast's new secure build and release environment to add additional layers of certainty. Aside from occasional false positives (and past philosophical differences with ESET and Microsoft with regards to the installers) we're had no incidents with releases since 5.33. Indeed. McAfee flags it as "Artemis!C49DC30B0BB7" - which basically means that McAfee doesn't know what it is yet. I am not familiar with MaxSecure, but niche players with a small installation footprint tend to either take a feed from another company's Threat Labs, or to rely heavily on "AI" (ie: heuristic) detection which is heavily prone to false-positive flagging like this.

Seems like one of the moderators had a copy of your PayPal receipt, which included a copy of your Cleverbridge invoice number. From that I can see that: You were sent an email by Cleverbridge on March 1st reminding you of your upcoming charge. The charge was made, as advised, on March 16th. It does not seem that you contacted CCleaner customer support, but Cleverbridge - who forwarded us your requests yesterday evening around GMT 19:00. At 23:51 GMT yesterday, CCleaner customer support contacted you to advise that future billing had been cancelled and confirming if you still wished to proceed with a refund and cancellation of your CCleaner licence. Upon your confirmation that you did desire a refund, this was already issued to your PayPal account at GMT 00:02 this morning. To ensure a prompt response to any concerns with your account, we always recommend that customers contact customer support at support@ccleaner.com directly.

It is a little difficult to respond with meaningful specifics to an anonymous post, but here are some general notes that may be of assistance: Piriform's online sales for CCleaner for Windows are handed by Cleverbridge. When you buy CCleaner and start a subscription you receive an order confirmation email with your licence information that also includes the contact information for customer support and a link to cancel any future subscription billing at any time. Customers who aren't keen on the notion of an ongoing subscription past their initial 12/14 month term will often cancel their future billing immediately after purchase. As with any subscription, cancelling future billing will mean that your service will terminate at the end of the current billing period (ie: your licence expiry date) unless you remember to take some action to manually pay your next bill before then. At any time during the course of your subscription, you can cancel future billing either by clicking on the link in your original order confirmation email, through the CCleaner console itself, or via an email to customer support. Whether your subscription billing is active or not, a few weeks prior to your expiry date you will receive multiple reminders via email and in-product messaging that your initial subscription term is coming to an end, and also with information on how you can renew early and/or upgrade to higher level of service at a discount. Some customers take this as an opportunity to take advantage of any current offers, and for others this is a reminder to contact customer support and cancel their upcoming subscription billing. To avoid a disruption to your service, your subscription billing should happen around 2 weeks prior to your licence expiry date. You will receive a notification from Cleverbridge of this upcoming billing, and the amount to be paid, an additional 2 weeks before this billing is due to occur. Again, this email contains a link that you can use to cancel this billing before it occurs. Piriform will also proactively cancel customer subscription billing under some circumstances. For example, if you have multiple 1 PC CCleaner Professional licences and subsequently purchased a 3 PC CCleaner Professional Plus licence or a 5 PC CCleaner Premium licence, then we will assume that the older licences are ones that you do not wish to maintain. Unwanted subscription renewal billing is fairly rare, but can still occur if you ignore the billing reminders. This can be easily resolved by contacting customer support at the email address provided in your original purchase email, the billing reminder email, the billing confirmation email, and other various correspondence - support@ccleaner.com. Note that if you contact customer support from the email account that you originally used to purchase CCleaner then your request will go straight into the priority support queue and the support team will be able to easily locate your purchase information. If not, then you may need to provide some other identifying information so that we can figure out who you are, such as the transaction ID from the billing notification that you received from Cleverbridge or your CCleaner licence key.

CCleaner 5.34.6207 was released in September 2017 and is now 67 versions out of date. The increased offer transparency (separate full screen offer format vs banner on the setup screen, accept/decline buttons vs pre-check and continue) started to be introduced in late 2019. For Chrome this was in place in mid-2020. From 2010 to 2019 the offer was baked into the installer, so there is no way to retrospectively change it on older versions. No longer using CCleaner 5.34 is a very good idea - given its age, I doubt it even still works properly. CCleaner 5.46 is the oldest version that will even load on Windows 10 1909 and above. With regards to CCleaner functionality, note that cleaning performance will degrade over time on older versions as changes to the operating system, browsers and other apps are reflected in changes to the cleaning rules. For a variety of reasons, unless you are using Windows XP or Vista, we recommend against using outdated versions of CCleaner.

CCleaner for Mac 2.x has quite a change to the user interface (it now looks more like a Mac product, rather than a PC port) and is being more actively maintained, with updates every 2 months - compared to the old CCleaner for Mac 1.x, for which updates were rather less frequent. On that topic, you might want to take a look at CCleaner for Mac 2.04.141 - which is due out today. Please note that the last release of CCleaner for Mac 1.x was 1.18.30 back in October 2020. As such, it may not work on BigSur 11.1 or above, on Monterey 12.x, or M1 hardware. While CCleaner for Mac 1.18 is no longer supported for free users, there is still a copy of the old version available for compatibility with active Professional Plus PC/Mac bundle subscriptions that have not yet been migrated: https://download.ccleaner.com/mac/CCMacSetup118.dmg (starts a download) - although those CCleaner Professional Plus customers are recommended to contact customer support to get a temporary CCleaner for Mac 2.x licence key.

... unless you are a business ;-)

@NikaNsk: I can see that there was a new ticket 865590 raised by Laurence on Feb 28th at 1047 GMT (that you screenshot above). But there is no sign of your response being received at our end. Could be an issue with your email provider. Do you have another email address that you can send from?

Also https://support.piriform.com/hc/en-us/articles/204043844-How-to-register-and-activate-CCleaner-Professional for licence registration tips. Note that as well as the licence key, entering the name exactly matching the one in your registration information is also important. For example, if you gave your name as "John Ronald Reuel Tolkien", then "John Tolkien" won't work.

@jcf: The table on the left is showing your desktop licences. It looks like your licence for CCleaner Professional for Windows expired a year ago, but your CCleaner Professional for Android (managed by Google Play) is still current and active.

Nergal is an astute observer of history. Piriform does not always release portable versions at the same time as the main release. And in this case, it was an interim release with only a build increment (from 1.53.1087 to 1.53.2065) rather than a version update release, and with no functionality added - so no update to the portable version. In a similar fashion, we updated the Defraggler, Recuva and Speccy installers back in 2020 - but since there was no change to the product itself, there was no need for a portable release at that time either.

Please note that this has nothing to do with CCleaner's automatic updates, and Piriform did not install Recuva on your computer. From your screenshot I can see that your licence is for CCleaner Professional Plus - which is a suite that includes the Professional version of CCleaner, Defraggler, Recuva and Speccy for up to 3 PCs. When you bought CCleaner Professional Plus, you might have seen this mentioned in the description, eg: or ... as well as in your order confirmation email. When installing CCleaner Professional Plus, the assumption is that you wish to use all of the included products, but if you only purchased the Professional Plus package for the extra seats rather than for the extra software, you can select which components you wish to install during the setup process: Should you wish to remove any of these at a later point in time, the easiest way to do this is through CCleaner's own software uninstaller (under Tools > Uninstall):

When you purchased, you should have received two emails from no-reply@cleverbridge.com. One with the subject line "Referenz-Nr. XXXXXXX: Zahlungsinformationen für CCleaner Professional" and the second "Referenz-Nr. XXXXXXXX: Ihre Bestellung von CCleaner Professional". That second one contains your licence key. If you are unable to locate your order confirmation emails, you should also be able to look up your licence information here: https://www.ccleaner.com/support/license-lookup ... and if all else fails, customer support will be able to assist (support@ccleaner.com)

Not the first time that our use of NSIS has created a rod for our own back. In theory. In practice this can depend a bit on what version the user originally installed, what updates they have had, if any updates are still incomplete, if they had log files in there, etc what their initial manifest of files was and what would be there now. Ensuring that the installation directory chosen is its own folder is probably the tidiest way to go.

That CCleaner should be removing everything from its installation directory is, under normal circumstances, exactly what you would want CCleaner to be doing. Not just the files from its original installation manifest but any updates, log files, etc so that it does not leave any traces of itself behind. Looking back through older forum posts I can find a couple of other cases over the past year where it looks like similar things may have happened. It seems as though a problem arises if an advanced user (after clicking through "Customize" and then "More" in their initial installation) has mistakenly configured their CCleaner installation directory to be {foldername}/ instead of {foldername}/CCleaner. So not a new issue if so, and a rare set of circumstances, but high-impact and one we'd want to shield our users from creating. The devs are looking at alternatives at the moment. We don't want to have circumstances where CCleaner errs on the side of caution and leaves bits of itself behind, or to prevent advanced users from installing CCleaner where they wish. A likely safety measure would be to partially sanitise the installation location chosen to ensure that it is indeed going into its own directory and not a parent directory.

@RAZOR: A 1 Jan 2000 expiry date is a "NULL" value indicating that the licence has been disabled. In this case, that looks like it was an old licence of yours that expired back in November 2021. There aren't any more recent licences under that email address, but if you try punching in any different email address that you may have used for any subsequent purchases: Edit: I see that you have already given support your alternative email address, so you can either check https://www.ccleaner.com/support/license-lookup or they will get back to you with the information.

@JudyCochran: Either the order confirmation email (or an accompanying "what to do with your key" email) should have included a note that you need to go to https://www.ccleanercloud.com/activation to enter the activation key. If that rather important piece of information was missing from your order confirmation email (or present but not readily obvious when perusing it) then I apologise for the confusion that was caused. The team is following this up with Sales Operations now to remedy for future communications. I just rechecked your ticket now at it looks like the support team responded to your email with the activation link at about the same time as I was writing my previous message - so I hope that this has sorted things out for you.

@muddie; I received a screenshot copy of your email and it would appear genuine. I would note the following important attributes: This is the campaign (two years of CCleaner Premium for the price of one, after cashback, with a bonus VPN) that is currently active for pre-expiry customers. If you are using CCleaner on your laptop then you should have received a notification of this campaign as well. When you went to "view in browser" I note that the URL is https://email.ccleaner.com - which is us. The link that you clicked on in the email should have gone to the campaign landing page hosted at https://www.ccleaner.com/ ... which, if so, is also us. The email contains your name (in lower case, since I guess that was how you entered it when you bought a two year subscription back in April 2020) as well as your current active licence key and your expiry date: I looked it up and that is indeed your correct and current licence key and expiry date for the licence key associated with the email address that you used to register on the forum. You can confirm this by going to https://www.ccleaner.com/support/license-lookup and entering your email address to get any licences with it. Might you have a more recent licence key that you bought using a different identity? Our systems do not attempt to guess if mr_barry_smith@work and bazza@gmail are the same person - so it is not uncommon for customers who swap between multiple email addresses to end up with multiple licences. Do you have a screenshot of that screen? If you elected to pay via PayPal, was that PayPal asking you to verify yourself with them to complete the transaction?

This is not a Cleverbridge invoice (as would be the case for the CCleaner consumer products, or for CCleaner Cloud purchased directly from CCleaner) but looks like it could be an invoice from either Avast or a reseller selling CCleaner Cloud on our behalf. I note that a ticket was raised with support earlier today. The CCleaner Cloud specialists are mainly working the US timezones, so someone should respond shortly with some help getting started with converting the trial to the full paid version.

@NikaNsk: I can see that you sent a request December 30th at 17:58 GMT saying that you were having trouble registering the licence key. You then received a response January 3th at 03:41 GMT from Raymond advising you that your licence was indeed valid until December 2022 and giving you some additional guidance on how to register your licence - with a note that the problem you were having was most likely that you had accidentally entered the letter "I" in your licence key as an "1", and asking you to get back to us if you still needed assistance, with a screenshot of the registration dialog if you required further assistance. There was a record of a successful licence activation made at around the same time - not sure if that was you following the instructions and successfully registering your licence, or Raymond triple-checking your licence validity by registering it himself to test. You did not reply to that email so the case closed, assuming that you had followed the instructions and had had no further difficulties. You did later indicate that you were unsatisfied with the assistance provided in the ticket close survey, and so Raymond followed up with you on January 8th at 09:49 GMT again requesting a screenshot of the registration information that you had attempted to enter so that he could help you with next steps. You do not appear to have responded to that email or raised any additional correspondence since then. So my suggestion to you would be as follows: Try following the instructions in the email that you were sent January 3rd - particularly with regard to using Copy and Paste for your licence key and/or being sure not to type a "1" instead of an "I" when entering your licence. This solves 95%+ of licence registration issues. If that does not work, then do respond to Raymond (or raise a new ticket) with the screenshot that was requested so that customer support can assist you further.

FYI: This was noted in the merged thread here: