A note on completeness and strongly clean rings

Many authors have investigated the behavior of strong cleanness under certain ring extensions. In this note, we investigate the classical problem of lifting idempotents, in order to consolidate and extend these results. Our main result is that if R is a ring which is complete with respect to an ideal I and if x is an element of R whose image in R/I is strongly π-regular, then x is strongly clean in R. This generalizes Theorem 2.1 of Chen and Zhou (2007)  [9].