Google Chrome browser sometimes gets you into trouble by showing errors that can be fixed and some can’t. You’re likely to experience most errors on development builds like Canary or dev. but that’s also not true, stable users also ran into update server issues with error 3 and error 7. Its true most can be solved by reinstalling chrome which may not be solution everyone hopes for.
Fix Chrome’s error : Your preferences file is corrupt or invalid
When you try to open Google Chrome you may get an error like this: ”your preferences file is corrupt or invalid. Google Chrome is unable to recover your settings’. The Fix worked for us is Resetting Chrome settings which was introduced with Chrome 29 release.
Reset Chrome settings
From Chrome menu, select Settings> Advanced > Restore settings to their original defaults, click ‘Reset Settings’
Note: You may want to uncheck ‘help make Chrome better by reporting current settings’.
“Your browser settings will be restored to their original defaults. This will reset your homepage, new tab page and search engine, disable your extensions and unpin all tabs. It will also clear other temporary and cached data, such as cookies, content and site data”.
Check if CCleaner is corrupting Chrome preferences file
If Resetting Chrome hasn’t helped, and you keep getting that dialog after running CCleaner, then here is a workaround that might actually work for you.
Open CCleaner, click on the Applications tab, under Google Chrome, remove tick mark for ‘Internet History’ and run CCleaner again. This time, Chrome’s preferences won’t be deleted.
You can delete Chrome’s internet or browser history by using Ctrl+Shift+Del command in the browser. (Have you got it? If you’ve any doubts, ask me in the comments.)
Psst! Incognito mode (Ctrl+Shift+N) may come in handy next time
Google Chrome: “Obliterate the following Items from the Beginning of the Time” [Meaning]
So if you’re using older versions prior to this, which is not recommended, you may try uninstall and reinstall of Chrome. If you ran into a situation where you can’t uninstall Chrome then know how to remove it.
Hope that helps. Have you got this error? How you fixed it? Share with us in comments.
You can’t copyright images of Google dialog boxes!
Resetting, uninstalling, and deleting all the info in the appdata folder have not worked. Well, it will work temporarily, but it still shows a prefrence.bad file in the appdata folder, and running ccleaner will bring up the error again, if you thought it was fixed.
Updated the post, you can see it and let me know if its working for you.
There’s a thread on Superuser (StackExchange/Stackoverflow) about this
http://superuser.com/questions/684538/ccleaner-is-corrupting-chromes-preferences-files
An answer there says that it’s because “Compact databases” was ticked, but that’s not the cause. I ran into this problem and I didn’t have “Compact databases” checked in CCleaner.
You can open the .bad file in a text editor, mine looks OK at first sight. I’ll do a diff to see if I can fix it manually by copying chunks of preferences like:
“spellcheck”: {
“dictionary”: “en-US”
}
Good luck!
Are you using “CCleaner” program? If so, then that error might happen again UNLESS you UNCHECK these under CCleaner’s application tab, under Google Chrome “Internet History” and “Last Download Location”. I did every combination in CCleaner’s settings (trial and error) and checking other options will not cause that error. Only those two I mentioned.
OK so I used CCleaner and my Chrome browser is now corrupted. Having now read many relevant posts, I’ve learned that before using Ccleaner, I need to uncheck “Compact databases,” “Internet History,” and “Last Download Location.” HOWEVER, my Chrome is already corrupted by this Ccleaner bug. I have uninstalled and reinstalled Chrome twice, including with a system restart. The icons for Chrome do appear, but they won’t open. As Chrome is my default browser (and my preferred browser), none of the links in my emails will load. How can I get Chrome back to normal?
Try running Software Removal tool from Google for Chrome first https://www.google.com/chrome/srt/, reset Chrome after that, hope it will work without any issues then.
Google keeps coming back as my websight , then it keeps shutting me down. I am so tired of this, I have been dealing with this for 2 years! I think it is corrupt ! I am writing this all over the internet for people to see maybe that will do someone some good . Tired in SC. Zenda Watford
Still have this issue, I do not have CCleaner. It also says I am running an older version, and that the administrator has disabled automatic updates, which is false. I am the administrator and have not touched chrome’s settings.IE is junk and Ffox too.any new suggestions?
Thanks,
David
Are you using older version of Chrome? Try to upgrade to latest version and check the problem persists.