I believe I am having a problem with my Recycle Bin.

I believe I am having a problem with my Recycle Bin.

I am no longer able to empty the Bin with a third party utility - CCleaner - that has always emptied it before.

Also, it appears that Recycle Bin is taking longer to show that a deleted file is there, taking longer to open, and taking longer to show the files it contains.

Windows 7.

My CCleaner stops at 20%: at the Recycle Bin. It won't clean the Recycle Bin and it won't go beyond it. If I uncheck "Recycle Bin" on CCleaner, it cleans the rest of the computer in seconds.

The problem began this morning.

Here's what did not help:

- Restore computer to an earlier point

- Uninstalling CCleaner and installing the latest version

I suspect something has happened to the Recycle Bin that I do not understand.

Can anyone offer me any suggestions on how to understand and correct the situation?

Thanks.

Beowulf.

 

Thanks !

I've never done anything with a command prompt before - sounds a bit scary for an amateur like me.

I'll give it a try when I get back to the computer in question.


Beowulf

 

I may have found an alternative solution.


Someone asked my if I hooked up any external drives. Well, not recently but I have had two hooked up for quite some time. So I went to look at the two externals in My Computer and one of the drives is unreadable and I get a message that I need to format it. The last time I looked at this drive a week or so ago it was formatted and almost full - with Acronis backups (and some other files). Maybe it filled completely and for some reason is unreadable.


I just turned this second external drive off and lo and behold CCleaner is zipping through it's cleaning process and not even blinking at the Recycle Bin!


I next turned the external drive back on. It seemed to spin up but the computer doesn't even know it is there. Perhaps the problem was not that it filled, but that it failed. I have an alternate backup on the other external and of course the original files on the internal hard drive. I guess I've lost the non-backup files I had on that failed external.


I am going to play around with this a little more tomorrow (I have very little time at this computer this week due to my work schedule) but I really think this is it.


I have my Recycle Bin back and I have my CCleaner back! At the cost of an external drive perhaps.



Beo