CCleaner is currently broken, but a fix is planned

Although it’s had a number of problems in the past, most following Piriform’s takeover by Avast in 2017, CCleaner remains a great program for removing junk from your computer.

Except that’s not true of the latest version of the program which users report is unable to clear cookies from Chrome and other browsers.

Posting on the CCleaner Community Forums, user Haapy notes:

Windows 10 21H2, CCleaner 96.0.4664.93. Cookies are not deleted in C:/Users/"USER"/appdata/local/google/chrome/userdata/default/network/cookies.

I just discovered this using SuperAntiSpyware. I had over 500 cookies stored there. I made an addition to CCleaner, Options, Include to point to this file and it took care of it.

Either this is a bug in CCleaner or a recent change in Chrome.

Other users report the same problem, with one noticing that CCleaner shows the cookies as having been removed when in fact they are still there. Another user found CCleaner wasn’t deleting cookies in Firefox either.

Responding to the complaints, Piriform Support says: "Thank you for highlighting this to us we have found the issue and it will be fixed in the next update to CCleaner."

While the recommended solution is to wait for an update, another user on the forums, zakoul, has found a workaround:

It looks like Google Chrome has changed the location of the cookie. To clear cookies in google chrome, before clearing, you need to move the cookie file from the "User Data\Default\Network" folder to the "User Data\Default" folder. After clearing the cookie, you must return it back to "User Data\Default\Network"

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