Ever felt frustrated by CCleaner’s relative limited support for third-party apps? Did you know you can – with a lot of care – add your own programs to its cleaning database? Does that sound a bit scary? No matter, you can add support for hundreds more programs with no fuss using a free tool called CCEnhancer 4.1.

The tool lets you easily augment the CCleaner information file with 1,000 other program options – and with the release of version 4.1, the tool makes it easier for you to add your own program entries from within CCEnhancer itself.

CCEnhancer is basically a shell program, providing you with a convenient download link to a replacement winapp2.ini file that contains all the program cleaning definitions. Because the file itself is updated regularly, the idea is that you run the program and click Download Latest to get hold of the latest definitions.

Users can now incorporate custom program cleaning routines directly from the CCEnhancer user interface.

Adding support for a thousand extra programs has a performance hit on CCleaner itself – when starting, be prepared to wait a long time while it loads in all those entries, which are marked with an asterisk to make it clear they’ve been added by a third party.

CCEnhancer itself is mindful of this, and provides various tools for managing the list. Click Advanced > Trim winapp2.ini, which reduces the size of the file – see the Winapp2.ini website for details on how this works. To revert back to CCleaner’s default settings, click Functions > Delete Custom Rules.

Version 4.1 adds a new box – accessible under Settings > Custom Entries tab – that allows users to manually input references to programs. It’s clearly aimed at advanced users, and should of course be treated with care – you could end up deleting critical program or even system entries. For more information on how this works, see this Piriform support forum post.

Version 4.1 also adds Greek and Slovak localisations, is capable of detecting CCleaner64.exe even when CCleaner.exe has been deleted, and removes in-app advertisements.

The update is rounded off by tweaks Bulgarian and Russian localisations, and unspecified bug fixes.

CCEnhancer 4.1 is available as a freeware download for Windows running CCleaner or CCleaner Portable. It is not in any way affiliated with or endorsed by Piriform, the makers of CCleaner.