Similar issues have been discussed, but not really resolved. Any ideas out there?
It's a Dell desktop running Windows 7 on a 500B hard drive. It was a clean install on brand new formatted drive, not an upgrade. It is about a year and a half old. Out of the blue, the available free space shrank from 450 GB to about 4GB. It's a stand-alone computer in a business, used for tracking inventory. It's behind a firewall and is not used for casual internet browsing, email, or any non-business uses. Virus and malware scans have revealed no problems.
I traced the huge gob of data to the c:/windows/system32/config/systemprofile/appdata/local/microsoft/windows/ directory. Checking Properties on that directory from within the c:/windows/ . . . windows parent directory shows hundreds of GBs being used, with tens of thousands of files. If I open the directory, there is nothing listed other than a subdirectory called Cache, which under properties shows 0 files. Using Select All>Properties shows 0 bytes.
There is no Temporary Internet Files or IE.5 folder shown in the directory. I have the View Files set to show system and hidden files, but nothing is listed. Trying to erase the directory from within Wndows causes the preparing to erase files dialog, but that runs for hours without ever counting files or estimating time for deletion, and without apparent result. It doesn't seem to hang up; it just never seems to be able to count all the files. The same thing happens when I run Disk Cleanup. I have run checkdisk: nothing.
I have done a clean boot, and booted in safe mode, but I still cannot manage to erase that obese directory or its contents, whatever they are.
I have also tried to erase using the *.* mode from a command line as administrator in a DOS window, with no result.
I would sure appreciate any wisdom from this forum.
Doug
It's a Dell desktop running Windows 7 on a 500B hard drive. It was a clean install on brand new formatted drive, not an upgrade. It is about a year and a half old. Out of the blue, the available free space shrank from 450 GB to about 4GB. It's a stand-alone computer in a business, used for tracking inventory. It's behind a firewall and is not used for casual internet browsing, email, or any non-business uses. Virus and malware scans have revealed no problems.
I traced the huge gob of data to the c:/windows/system32/config/systemprofile/appdata/local/microsoft/windows/ directory. Checking Properties on that directory from within the c:/windows/ . . . windows parent directory shows hundreds of GBs being used, with tens of thousands of files. If I open the directory, there is nothing listed other than a subdirectory called Cache, which under properties shows 0 files. Using Select All>Properties shows 0 bytes.
There is no Temporary Internet Files or IE.5 folder shown in the directory. I have the View Files set to show system and hidden files, but nothing is listed. Trying to erase the directory from within Wndows causes the preparing to erase files dialog, but that runs for hours without ever counting files or estimating time for deletion, and without apparent result. It doesn't seem to hang up; it just never seems to be able to count all the files. The same thing happens when I run Disk Cleanup. I have run checkdisk: nothing.
I have done a clean boot, and booted in safe mode, but I still cannot manage to erase that obese directory or its contents, whatever they are.
I have also tried to erase using the *.* mode from a command line as administrator in a DOS window, with no result.
I would sure appreciate any wisdom from this forum.
Doug
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