Widget Cleaner is a tool that can sometimes restore the original behavior of Widgets that have failed, or, if you're a Widget developer, easily test the first-run experience of your Widget.
I re-named it "Purge" when I fitted it into my Widget Dock. (I have to think of something short for the new Dock tiles, and "WASH" just didn't capture the spirit of this thing!
What this widget does (as best I understand it) is clean out the files a Widget keeps on all the changes you've made. And there are probably history files and all sorts of junk saved by the different widgets. I often throw all of this stuff out by hand, but it's tedious, and I've in…advertently killed a few widgets.
I REALLY like how I can just dump the creaky, overloaded widgets into Merlin's Cleaner and let the Cleaner go find the right file or files to trash. It's painless. And it really makes a difference sometimes--way more often than I'd have expected.
oh my god! wow- im so thankful for this- i've had an issue several times (and always with my favorite widgets) where i would try to open a widget and would get an error saying "could not open widget- unknown exception encountered during onload" and then another error would pop up saying "yahoo widget needs to close...etc" and was only once able to fix it (i found a weird registry key w/ name of widget & deleted it) but all the other times i was never able to use the widget again... CON'T ABOVE NEXT POST ^
I never thought of something like this before! Very good idea, will be using this when making all my widgets so i don't have to go into regEdit to clear the values. Good job Harry and Laurrent.