Don

Sure sounds like a virus to me. I would proceed as if there was a virus. 
Turn off System Restore. Start in safe mood. Clean up drive as much as 
possible. Run anti virus and anti spyware scans on BOTH  C & E drives. 
Turn back on System Restore. Restart computer in normal mode. I'm sure 
you know the drill. Just that sometimes when up to your a-- in 
alligators, it is hard to remember that your job was to drain the swamp.

Tom

Don Penlington wrote:
> A friend called me over last nite.
>
> His computer is running XP SP2. He was getting a message that the hard 
> drive was nearly full.
>
> His HD is divided into 2 partitions, C and E. C is 12 Gb and E is 
> about 60 Gb.
>
> I checked the C properties and it showed only 45 Mb free space. The 
> computer was hardly running at all.
>
> I managed to delete about 1 Gb of stuff off C so that now there was 
> over 1Gb free space showing on C properties. Rebooted and performance 
> was back to normal.
>
> Ran Spybot spyware check after updating and all clean. I didn't run an 
> antivirus check as it would have taken too long.
>
> 1/2 hour later, up came the same message that the hard drive was full. 
> On checking C properties again, this time it showed no free space at 
> all---100% used.  The computer almost came to a halt and had 
> difficulty closing and rebooting.
>
> E drive was OK, plenty of free space there.
>
> What could cause the C drive to fill of its own accord?  Is there a 
> class of virus that does this? Or gives out spurious messages to this 
> effect?
>
> He's not very diligent about updating the a-v database, so I'm not 
> confident that an a-v check will pick up anything. It probably 
> wouldn't run anyway if the C-Drive is really full.
>
> I don't think it would be possible for anything that size (1 Gb) to 
> have been downloaded off the internet during that time, as he thinks 
> his bandwidth allocation is limited to dialup at the moment, though 
> he's not certain about that.
>
> Another thing which may be part of the same problem is that I cannot 
> open the Recycle Bin to empty it. When I check its properties, I get a 
> message that Recycle Bin is not accessible. What could cause that?
>
> I know there are some security suites such as Nortons that lock the 
> Recycle Bin, but he has nothing like that on the computer.
>
> Don Penlington
>               

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