My best guess is that some program you have installed might be trying to send info back to the developer as part of their quality assurance monitoring. But, such behavior should be viewed with suspicion. You might post your question in the Computer viruses and spyware forum with Computer Hope's forum.
By the way, what anti-virus software do you have? Do you have any anti-spyware tools installed?
Err...
this is a registry key we're talking about.
I think the advice that is oddly missing from this thread is to stop running the registry cleaner. For all we know at this point it could be a missing Recently Used List item, or something.
Additionally- as was noted before, we really don't have a whole lot of info about what was displayed- we know that there was a key containing the text "QA TEST SYSTEM", but the real question is what ccleaner stated the "problem" was with this key.
Also, if this is the only problem CCleaner reports, then your worrying far too much. I just ran it myself and CCleaner gives me several pages of "issues" half of which are 100% by design (.NET framework stuff).
The only thing that I can see being an issue here is that the key "reappears" when you rerun ccleaner.
a registry key "reappearing" simply means that something uses that key. Also it's important to note that ccleaner's registry cleaner doesn't detect malware keys, but rather simply helps delete registry keys it finds obsolete. This can save you a few kilobytes of space. IMO not worth the 40 seconds of of work to run the program.
Additionally- I'm curious as to how this can be thought to be "bad"? while it certainly makes sense to be sort of suspicious of things that you don't understand- in this case, the name "QA TEST SYSTEM" means, of course, "Quality Assurance Test System" And you know what? It's probably just some testing stuff somebody left in an application that you use- it reappears when you use that application.
Other posts in this thread,while well-meaning, have made huge leaps of logic and stated that this sort of information may be being sent over the internet. Such scare mongering is empty at best. without actual information that suggests such behaviour- How a single registry key that is being recreated by an application somehow indicates remote monitoring software. If there was remote monitoring software involved- what does it use the key for? why does it have such a name? Can remote monitoring software somehow not send data without creating random registry key?. There are many other keys you could delete from the registry that would reappear with default values almost immediately- does this one key being detected by ccleaner indicate a threat? I don't think so. Suggesting posters go to the malware forum when they don't even have any definite signs of infection wastes both the Original Poster's time, as well as those of malware specialists. While it is certainly no question that there could be malware involved in this, there are a few problems with such a theory- first, malware doesn't have quality assurance, and second, malware doesn't get extensive testing. and unless malware is creating an empty registry key just to frustrate users of ccleaner I highly doubt that is the case. (the question here isn't wether the system is infected but rather wether that infection is causing this behaviour, of course an infected system can exhibit no outward signs of infection)
phobarbenix- there are several things you can do.
First- you can simply ignore it. In fact, to me it sounds like your smart enough with computers to know to be suspicious, but haven't yet learned what type of things to be suspicious
of. In general, a recurring registry key (at least, with a name like this) is nothing to be concerned about. Curious, maybe.
If you are indeed curious as to the origin of this key, We can certainly help. But we will need to know what ccleaner says about this key- most items in the registry cleaner are labelled with a "problem" which indicates why the key is marked for deletion. If possible it would be most helpful for analysis if you could give us what ccleaner labels as the "problem" as well as the full text that it places in the "data" column.
