Disappearing hard drive space.

[Ben E Lou]

Something is writing files to my hard drive, I guess. I cleaned 6 Gig worth of junk out this afternoon, go out, come back home three hours later, and I'm down to 178MB of space. Huh???

I did a search for files that have been written today, and there are 1,186 of them--a huge number of those starting with "Acr," such as AcrFC11.tmp, which was writtten at 7:22pm, when I was not at my computer. They're in my C:\WINDOWS\Temp folder. What are these, and how can I stop them from being written? The "Acr" files are taking up over 8 Gig of space. Looking at the time stamps, it appears that it's writing bunches of them until the hard drive is full. A little help, please.

[cartman]

Have you done the standard virus/spyware scans? I seem to remember coming across a keylogger program that used ACR in the file name.

[cartman]

Dola,

It also might be a problem with Adobe Acrobat. I seem to remember a bug that would create tons of files. Let me see if I can find something in my notes about that.

[cartman]

Double dola,

I found my notes on it. Look for a file named acrordIf.dll in your Acrobat directory structure. Rename it to .old, and see if the temp files stop being created.

[Celeval]

Check out:

http://ask-leo.com/comments_000306.php?page=4
http://www.adobeforums.com/cgi-bin/webx/.3bc0bde4?14

Try uninstalling/reinstalling Adobe Acrobat; then the MS Indexing service (cidaemon).

[Ben E Lou]

Thanks, Greg and Kevin.

[Ben E Lou]

Goodness. Those puppies were taking up 26 Gig of space. :eek:

[gstelmack]

Search for WinDirStat as well. When you start running out of hard drive room, it's a great way to see where it is all going.

[Ben E Lou]

This appears to have solved my problem. Thanks again, guys. No new files written to that directory in the last half hour.

[ozias]

You may want to run HighjackThis just to see if anything else is in there.

CCleaner is another good program to clean things up with.

Spybot Search & Destroy, SpywareBlaster, and Ad-Aware for Spyware removal.

Ewido for those very hard to remove trojans/virus/spyware/etc. if none of the above works. Note, Ewido now comes packaged with AVG, but you can download it, run it and let it remove the nasty stuff(good for 14 days). Then uninstall Ewido and run CCleaner and it will remove the registry components of Ewido, so then you can re-install Ewido at a later date and still have another 14 days to use it.

Or purchase it, 29.95 for 1 year, 39.95 for 2 years. ;)

[cartman]

ya know, SkyDog, there are easier ways to hide 'teh pron' from SWMBO...

:D

[sterlingice]

ya know, SkyDog, there are easier ways to hide 'teh pron' from SWMBO...

:D

Hehe :)

SI

[Ben E Lou]

This appears to have solved my problem. Thanks again, guys. No new files written to that directory in the last half hour.

Confirmed fixed. Space still clean upon waking up.