The residual closure of a subgroup H of a group G is the intersection of all virtually normal subgroups of G containing H. We show that if G is generated by finitely many cosets of H and if H is commensurated, then the residual closure of H in G is virtually normal. This implies that separable commensurated subgroups of finitely generated groups are virtually normal. A stream of applications to separable subgroups, polycyclic groups, residually finite groups, groups acting on trees, lattices in products of trees and just-infinite groups then flows from this main result.

We study totally disconnected locally compact second countable (t.d.l.c.s.c.) groups that contain a compact open subgroup with finite rank. We show such groups that additionally admit a pro-π compact open subgroup for some finite set of primes π are virtually an extension of a finite direct product of topologically simple groups by an elementary group. This result, in particular, applies to l.c.s.c. p-adic Lie groups. We go on to obtain a decomposition result for all t.d.l.c.s.c. groups containing a compact open subgroup with finite rank. In the course of proving these theorems, we demonstrate independently interesting structure results for t.d.l.c.s.c. groups with a compact open pro-nilpotent subgroup and for topologically simple l.c.s.c. p-adic Lie groups.