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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