Interesting. Even though I have the browser (IE11 or Firefox 36.0) clear history CCleaner still found cookies associated with them. I should have captured the window on what CCleaner deleted to post but forgot.
I'm not 100% on what you are indicating here, but if you use Firefox and not IE and wonder why there are IE cookies, it is because a lot of software uses IE libraries. Programs such as Steam, Windows Help, and a lot of other applications will use IE's rendering library to provide a "web-like" experience. So for example opening "Windows Help and Support" will cause cookies and cache information to appear that is associated with Internet Explorer. This is nothing to be alarmed about under most circumstances.
BTW I used SpeedZooka to clean up things on my PC and it missed these items which CCleaner found. I'm not knocking SpeedZooka maybe it's strength lies elsewhere like registry clean-up.
This topic comes up often. And I've written a lot about it myself but basically, Registry cleaners are quite useless, and tools designed to "clean the registry" are often responsible for far greater harm than any good they can be associated with. They are marketed in extremely unethical ways, often with outright lies that the uninitiated person will find interesting, because they will put their trust in the software company to not be lying to them, which unfortunately is almost never the case.
fallacies about the Windows Registry is typically how the software is marketed as being useful. Usually, the vendor will say that their registry cleaner will fix Registry Errors, and will "clean" the registry. This is a problematic claim because the Registry is effectively a centralized database. The software my company makes reads and writes information to the registry; the software Microsoft makes does the same, and so on; but the thing is, other applications aren't going to know anything about how other programs are storing and using that data. Typically, the approach the software takes is to try to effectively "guess" what the registry data is. So for example if it see' s a value that kinda looks like a File path, but it cannot find the file, they often register that as a registry error. The problem is that is a guess- it's pure speculation on the part of the cleaner software to assume it knows that the setting is an "error" if the file already exists. Many software programs will use registy values to indicate the
next file they should use, for example, so the setting pointing at a file that doesn't exist is entirely expected.
Furthermore, most software programs aren't written with the expectation that their data will be screwed up. While one could always argue that software should always be written to expect the unexpected, other applications coming in and mucking around with their information is just going to toss a monkey wrench in the works. In the above example, after the cleaner has "fixed" the error, what if the program doesn't properly handle the case where the key is missing? Or, worse, it could start overwriting old data. Again, these are effectively bugs in the program, but they would never occur if other applications didn't put their greasy mitts onto data that didn't belong to them and try to guess what was supposed to be there.
Speed-up programs, more generally, are usually not very useful, often the background processes they run slow the system down more than any other software. Furthermore, when a piece of software claims that a system is in "poor condition" when it is a fresh, clean, Windows Install, it brings their ethics into question, in my opinion, and that is almost always what I've seen when I tested such software.
