[OlPhilosopher]

I have a mystery with CCleaner.
Got a shock this morning. I have "protected" cookies selected under Ace. I had 71, which are sites with passwords, and other frequently visited sites where I wanted to preserve my preferences. I review these entries almost daily, and delete all "unchecked" (unprotected) cookies, Appears to work great, getting rid of unwanted cookies and saving the ones I want.

So I ran CCleaner, with the "cookies" box unchecked so it wouldn't mess with >any< of my cookies and I could manage them with Ace. HA! Today, when I checked my cookies list in Ace, there were only THIRTEEN cookies left! They were all ones I had "protected", but the other 58 had gone bye-bye.

I had also run MalWareBytes and SuperAntiVirus prior to running CCleaner. No cookies were found to contain any problems. Can anyone offer any explination of which of these programs may have flushed my cookies, or what setting I could use to prevent it in the future? Like I said, I had excluded all cookies (I thought) from the CCleaner scan..

[mphenterprises]

Hi OlPhilosopher. I have branched your issue into its own Discussion. Your post is a specific problem and would be better served in its own Discussion so that the members of the Community have a greater chance of seeing and responding to your question.

[number6]

I think you might have missed one of the cookies check boxes in CCleaner. There is one for each of your browsers, Internet Explorer and Firefox. Did you make sure that you unchecked both boxes?

[coastie65]

Hi and welcome to the forum. In both Malwarebytes and SUPERantispyware, you can manage the stuff. In superantispyware, once the scan is complete, check the items and uncheck the ones you want to remain. In Malwarebytes, on the start page, click on the bottom right button. you should then get a page with a bunch of tabs across the top. Click on the Log tab and then the date of the scan. This will bring up the log of the stuff that was removed on that scan. coastie65

[OlPhilosopher]

Hi!

I'll try the Super scan again and see what shows up. In MWB, the only thing in the logs are infections removed, of which there were none. In CCleaner, I don't run any browser than Internet Explorer, and there are no check boxes for programs not installed.

Funny thing, after posting the first message here, I ran PageDefrag and nothing else. Went back into Ace, and ALL my cookies were gone! Ha! I can spend the rest of the day going to all my usual sites and restoring all my defaults. BTW: all this "cleaning" killed my email notifications from THIS board. X-(

I don't know if this discussion is going to go anywhere, but I think my 'puter either developed Alzheimer's, or it's kicked in its own A.I. :^0

[coastie65]

:^0 I don't know about "Protected Cookies", as I don't. I just get rid of the things, as they'll be back anyway. That is interesting about losing the notifications, as with the amount of cleaning I do, I have never had that situation. If I am signed in and i decide to do a cleaning job, I'll have to sign in again afterwards, but that is it. With CCleaner, you do have to be careful with the registry aspect of it, as that can cause some problems if you are not careful. I generally back up the registry files before running that thing. coastie

[OlPhilosopher]

Yeah, I was pretty nervous about letting CCleaner touch my Registry. I trust Ace, and I've become pretty good at manually editing the Registry, but I'm nervous about other "registry cleaners".
Anyway, from what I can tell, PageDefrag (maybe?) messed with some of the data links. My email notices are fine here now that I've logged back in. The really interesting part is that I've gone to several usual sites, this included, and when I go back into Ace now, the cookie for PC World has re-appeared, checked and protected automatically. It also says it's been accessed 133 times. I've only been on here 3-4 times since the cookie disappeared in Ace, but all my visits were still recorded when it reappeared? As Arty Johnson would say, "Veeerrry interesting"

[coastie65]

I'm not really familiar with Page Defrag as I have never used it. I don't really think there is anything of a serious nature going on, annoying maybe, but not serious. I don't particularly pay any attention to the cookies. I know they are there, until I remove them, and just write it off as part of the scheme of things, They aren't any threat for the most part, and I've my settings, so as to eliminate most of them. If I set it any higher, I would have access problems, as you have to allow some cookies in order to visit some sites. coastie