Yet Another Serious Disk Cleanup Issue

It was not so long ago when we saw a major problem with the Windows Vista Disk Cleanup tool, after a registry cleaner broke a vital handler information in the registry.

Here is another such case, but on this occasion the system is running Windows XP.

Question: I have used a registry cleaner in my DELL 8400 and I have exactly the same problem as mentioned in the blog post Serious Disk Cleanup problem caused by broken registration. The Disk Cleanup program cleaned up everything including my Windows XP installation. Is there a fix for Windows XP?

(Information in this post applies to Windows XP systems only.)

After comparing the VolumeCaches branch which was sent to me by the asker, I narrowed down the issue to the following key:

In the above key, the value named Folder was missing. The Folder value should be present, and must have the following Value data

As a result of the missing value, when you select the entry Catalog files for the Content Indexer in Disk Cleanup, files in the current partition is erased.

SCREENSHOT

FIXING THE CONTENT INDEX HANDLER

Here is a registry fix which reinstates the missing entry. Download contentindexcleaner.reg and save to Desktop. Right-click on the file and choose Merge. Click Yes when asked for confirmation.

Copyright © 2008 Ramesh Srinivasan. All rights reserved.