[Serious] Bug Report Registry Cleaning

flexy123

Windows 8.1 Pro, 64Bit, latest JV16 Pro which I just downloaded an hour or so ago.

This is another *serious* bug which would likely entirely screw up a system. As a test I had it do a pass "Clean Registry" to look at the results:

JV16 *thinks* it found (lots) of errors because E:\ is supposedly missing

Except that those registry entries have nothing to do with a drive or path, see here:

~~I think the above is self-explaining....running the cleaner here would definitely cause some major problems....~~

jv16

That's a great catch, thank you! I actually fixed this issue already yesterday, but the fix hasn't been included to the currently latest product version.

Gladly, this doesn't seem to be have very serious effects, I have ran the CFMC tool in few different Windows 8.1 test environments, these entires were picked up and removed but that didn't seem to have any effect to the system. But it's a false positive in any case, and we will roll out a fixed version ASAP.

Thanks for reporting!

Any users wishing to ensure this issue do not affect them, can add "\appx" and "ms-resource:" lines (without the ""s) to the Global Ignore List of the program.

jv16

By the way, one clarification: Your system does have an E: drive, right?

jv16

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jv16

Just to be on the safe side, we are rolling out an updated build with this bug fixed. It will be released in the next hour or so. Thank you for reporting!

flexy123

Yes I have an E:\ drive too, but it's a backup drive.

Thanks for sorting this out that quick, nice to see!

jv16

The fact that you have an E:\ drive is a critical factor for this bug - anyone without an E:\ drive is unaffected by this issue as the bug requires you to have the drive to occur.

This is why:

The registry cleaning engine interprets "ms-resource://foobar" to mean a file path "e://foobar" that is "e:\foobar", if you have no E:\ drive, the data is automatically ignored as it is interpreted to be a reference to a removable disk drive which is currently disconnected.

Sometimes file paths in the registry are encoded with inverted slashes ("C:/foobar/foo.exe" meaning "C:\foobar\foo.exe") and sometimes the file paths are encoded with double slashes ("C:\\foobar\\foo.exe") and finally, sometimes with both inverted and doubled slashes: "C://foobar//foo.exe". This explains why the registry cleaner engine incorrectly analyzed the data such as "ms-resource://foobar" to mean a file reference.

Like said, this issue has been in the registry cleaner engine at least from PowerTools 2014, probably from even earlier version, but since the issue is both quite rare (not many users have Windows 8+ AND an E:\ drive) and not super critical (removing those false positive entries does not cause serious issues to Windows) it has gone undetected and unreported for this long. So, thank you very much for reporting this!