The little freeware program CCleaner (donation requested) does a lovely job of cleaning up your hard drive—getting rid of file fragments, .dlls no longer needed, desktop icons not attached to anything, etc. Basically, it strips the crap from your computer: all that stuff left behind when you uninstall programs.

BUT: you must be careful, specifically if you use Cloudmark (as I do) as your anti-spam program. The support I got from Cloudmark was exemplary—they responded quickly, and got me back up and running. What finally worked was uninstalling Cloudmark totally, rebooting, running Outlook’s Help, Detect and Repair… utility, and then reinstalling from a new download. I then went to Cloudmark’s “My Account” to notify them that I do have a subscription—and discovered, to my surprise, that the subscription is now $4/month (on month-by-month basis) rather than $2. When did that happen? But if I buy a year’s subscription, it’s $24—back to the $2/month that I thought I was already paying. So that’s a silver lining right there: $24 saved. And for $24 you can get a very nice shaving cream.

Back to CCleaner: When you start it up, it shows you what it’s going to clean: those things that are checked, and the default checks need some unchecking. There are two tabs: “Windows” and “Applications”.

On the “Windows” tab, I just unchecked “Clipboard”—might as well leave that holding whatever it does. On the “Applications” tab, I should have unchecked: everything under Firefox except “Internet cache”—no problem in clearing that. Also—and this is what I hope will protect me—I unchecked “Office 2003″, which means that CCleaner will stay away from that.

When I did run it, though, it freed up 681 MB of hard-drive space—not trivial. I also ran the Registry cleaner (separate thing: “Issues”), and this is what Cloudmark support believes might have created the problem. I won’t be running that again anytime soon.

So: use it with caution.

LeisureGuy: screwing up so you don’t have to.