PatchCleaner (DotNET system files utility)

[Midas]

PatchCleaner (http://www.homedev.com.au/Free/PatchCleaner) advertises a portable version, which is reason enough to submit this very specific kind of utility; but being a DotNET app (v4.5.2 required) it is reasonable to expect issues with its stealthiness (untested!). PatchCleaner also features CLI support, making it suitable for scripting.

• PatchCleaner clean[s] your windows installer directory. [...] The windows operating system holds a list of current installers and patches, that can be accessed via WMI calls (Windows Management Instrumentation). PatchCleaner obtains this list of the known msi/msp files and compares that against all the msi/msp files that are found in the "c:\Windows\Installer" directory. Anything that is in the folder but not on the windows provided list is considered an orphaned file and is tagged to be moved or deleted.

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Download latest PatchCleaner portable version (currently v1.4.2.0) from https://sourceforge.net/projects/patchc ... _Portable/.

[webfork]

XP users (since this seems to be a common topic on the site lately): not compatible with Windows XP.

License: Unknown. There's a sourceforge page but that doesn't mean it's open source https://sourceforge.net/projects/patchcleaner/ ... Softpedia seems to think it's freeware: http://www.softpedia.com/get/Security/S ... aner.shtml

I tested this on a reasonably recent install so there were no orphans. Without an extensive test, it does looks portable, but there are really only a few settings to change anyway.

[Emka]

It says it cleans orphaned files but I'm still wondering whether a system cleaner like that is likely to cause any problems in the way some aggressive registry cleaners and so-called system optimizers do.