- Feb 4, 2016
- 2,520
Reports are coming in that Piriform is forcing CCleaner to update to the latest 5.46 version even when users had configured the program to not perform automatic updates. To make matters worse, once the users were upgraded to the latest version, their privacy settings were reverted to default, which is to allow anonymous usage data to be sent to Avast/Piriform.
This was first reported on September 6th at Piriform's forum, where users stated that their installed versions of CCleaner were being updated to 5.4.6 even after disabling automatic updates. This was later confirmed in a post to our forums.
As a test, I downloaded and installed the Slim version of CCleaner 5.37 that we host at BleepingComputer.com.
During the setup procedure, I configured the program to not automatically check for new updates. Even with that setting disabled, CCupdate.exe was automatically executed by the installer and CCleaner was updated to version 5.46 before I could even start the program. This is illustrated in the video below.
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How to disable CCleaner automatic updates
As CCleaner is ignoring a users preferences and forcing updates to be installed, if you want to disable updates you need to delete an executable called CCUpdate.exe that is installed along with CCleaner.
When CCleaner is installed, it will install a file at C:\Program Files\CCleaner\CCupdate.exe that is used to install updates to CCleaner. This program is then configured to automatically run every day by a Scheduled Task called CCleaner Update.
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