Symptoms

When you click the Disk Cleanup button located in the hard disk drive property sheet, Disk Cleanup may not open. Instead, one of the following may occur:

  • Your user profile folder or the My Documents folder may open.
  • The following error message occurs:

Windows cannot locate the Disk Cleanup program. The program file may be corrupted or may have been deleted from your computer. To reinstall Disk Cleanup, run Windows Setup again.

Resolution

To resolve the problem, fix the Disk cleanup path in the registry.

Start Regedit.exe and navigate to:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE \ SOFTWARE \ Microsoft \ Windows \ CurrentVersion \ Explorer \ MyComputer \ cleanuppath

Double-click (default) in the right pane, and set the Path as follows:

C:\Windows\system32\cleanmgr.exe /D %c

Close Regedit.exe

Alternately, apply the REG fix available at the bottom of this page.