You didn't say how much cleaning was needed and it also might depend on how many hard drives, their capacity and how they are connected that would determine how long the process would take. As well, an AV program could be involved. But 24 hours does sound a bit long. The machine may be hung. If you still have HD activity, perhaps the program is still active. If no HD activity, you might try to bring up the task manager (ctrl+alt+del) and see if the program shows as running. It might be that the system is hung and you'd need to try and shut down your disk cleaning program. I can't say what the outcome will be but your recycle bin will only hold so much before nothing else can go there. Windows will allocate a percentage of the drive for that function and, if filled up, you should be notified of such.
I installed the Wise Disk Cleaner and ran it and even though the files it found all say they are safe to remove, I'm concerned. For one thing, it's been "cleaning" for over 24 hours. I'm tempted to abort but since I haven't used it before I'm not sure what would happen. Will the files it's deleted so far be in the recycle bin for me to restore them? Why in the heck is it taking so long? It would be nice if there were some kind of time frame or showed some sort of indication as to how far along the cleaning process is.
Next, the files I selected for cleaning are mostly error files, temporary files, or old files and only what was "recommended" by the program. However, as I'm scrolling through the list of files marked for deletion, I see .exe, .dll, etc. file extensions so I'm really scared of what it's going to do to my computer when it finally does get done.
What should I do about this? Does anyone know what will happen if I stop the cleaning process?
Here is my system info:
Lenovo Desktop
Windows XP Prof, Version 2002 SP3
AMD Athlon(tm)64x2 Dual
Core processor 3800+
2.01 GHz 992MB of Ram

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