It's a pretty old problem , it used to be a couple of gbs so people didn't exactly mind that much , but this time , the files in the C are all 12 gbs , including the hidden of course , and the drive says 185 free out of 232 thats about 47 gbs in use ... not sure what to do with it.

Back up, reformat and re-install the OS.

Looks like I'm gonna have to, been waiting for an excuse to reformat anyways and put my os on the raid drives , Thanks.

Probably small fragmented files taking up a full block.

dude , that wasn't it, i defragmented a couple of times before i posted , I'll never know neways , formatted .

System restore? File system overhead? there are lots of reasons.

Have you ran a chkdsk /f to check the drive?(you have to reboot if its your main drive)

One more... when you using system restore it allocates some space that didn't shown as used ! so when you have used 12 GBs out of 232 it doesn't include system restore. By default it allocates 2% of HDD but depends of your OS it can be PREset to larger size.