I never found a really good solution to this problem when I had a vacuum cleaner with bags. Now I have a "bagless" one where you just empty out the canister and I love it. You can clean the canister itself, which helps a lot, but the real solution to the odor problem is that you can buy pretreated "Febreeze" replacement filters and they work really great! If they don't have the pretreated filters for your cleaner, I would suggest cleaning the filters and maybe spraying the filters themselves with Febreeze before putting them back in--maybe that would help.