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Disk Cleanup (Cleanmgr) goes into a loop

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by dittoheadstl

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I have tried to run Disk Cleanup (cleanmgr.exe) in Windows 2000 several times over the past few months. It seems to start off OK, showing that it's calculating how much space I can save, and is in the "Compress Old Files" stage of that process. The drive clicks away, and eventually stops... and cleanmgr.exe is taking up about 98% of the CPU. When I click the Cancel button, the window disappears, but Task Manager says it's still running and still eating CPU. I have another Win2K system, and it runs OK there.

I have exhausted every other avenue I can think of, including the Microsoft Knowledgebase, Google Searches and newsgroup searches. This is my last resort!

6 replies

by ajsdodd

Turn off your antivirus and then just let it run. I had the same thing happen. Seems that after a while the diskcleanup in Win2k checks for files that haven't been accessed since a certain date. When this happend to me it took about 1 hour before disk cleanup completed. All the time it appeared ad if disk cleanup was hung but it finally finished. It hasnt had this problem since then.

by dittoheadstl

I tried rebooting from scracth and disabling everything possible, including anti-virus software. First, I closed everything down in the system tray, and then used Task Manager to end processes (as allowed). Still, Disk Manager would seem to go into a permanent loop, taking the better part of an hour before I canceled it. In one other test, I let it run overnight and the whole system was hung up the next morning.

by c.barnhorst

I agree. The same thing happens with Defragging. The program keeps starting over. The cause is that another program is accessing the disk drive. It is usually an anti-virus checker or memory management utility or some TSR that is monitoring at some time interval. Running in Safe Mode if that is an option really speeds things up. Obviously if you are on a network other issues might prevent the above.

by dittoheadstl

I tried rebooting from scracth and disabling everything possible, including anti-virus software. First, I closed everything down in the system tray, and then used Task Manager to end processes (as allowed). Still, Disk Manager would seem togo into a permanent loop, taking the better part of an hour before I canceled it. In one other test, I let it run overnight and the whole system was hung up the next morning.

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