Bill wrote:
I use CCleaner everyday to purge my browsing history, etc.
It used to run faster. It takes quite a while to even remove
"counters.dat", whatever that is. I don't remember it being an issue
before. Evidently, I can accumulate 2000-8000 "tracking files" without
even doing a lot of browsing (how is this possible?). I don't even use
the IE browser, yet it seems to takes a while to remove Internet
explorer data. It is true that I am using an older version of the
CCleaner app, but I don't believe this is the issue. Thank you for your
guidance!

Bill

Use Process Monitor to track the I/O operations. The current
version may not be WinXP compatible, so you might need to look
for an older version for WinXP.

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sys...nloads/procmon

This is the info for WinXP:

Version 3.1

https://web.archive.org/web/20150117...rnals/bb896645

I had some trouble with the download link. I hope this works.

https://web.archive.org/web/20150208...essMonitor.zip

*******

The trace control is a tick mark in the file menu.
Remove the tick mark to stop the trace from collecting
any more data.

The filter is not important to collecting a trace.

Later, you can set the trace to:

"Operation" "Is" "CreateFile"
"Operation" "Is" "ReadFile"
"Operation" "Is" "WriteFile"

You can also limit the process name to whatever ccleaner
actually uses for operations.

By watching what it's doing, what file seems to take
many seconds to process, you can tell us what area
of the file system it's spending all this time.

*******

I have a browser (Seamonkey) which doesn't properly
clear the caches when you select that from the menu.

To deal with Seamonkey I delete a few things manually.

I'm not a CCleaner user, so I hope that much can get
you started. Start ProcMon, which will start tracing
right away. Start CCleaner. When CCleaner is finished
and exited, stop the trace in ProcMon using the File
menu tick box, then have a look at what happened.

Paul