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 > Do you want to signoff PCSOFT or just change to Digest mode - visit our web site: http://freepctech.com/pcsoft.shtml