Update: The whole Avast scan took 4 hours (!) and found nothing. But the summary page noted that the total of files scanned amounted to: 100.4 GB !! How is that possible on a 27 GB HD ?

Also, I downloaded + ran the Sequoia program (interesting). It shows a lot of space consumed by -- as expected -- Windows installer files. But when I click on properties for many of these files, they show that they were created long ago -- even several years ago.

Assuming that the problem lies here somewhere, now do I pinpoint it and safely recover the lost space ?

Thanks for any input !

Please download Malwarebytes' Anti-Malware to your desktop.

* Double-click mbam-setup.exe and follow the prompts to install the program.
* At the end, be sure a checkmark is placed next to Update Malwarebytes' Anti-Malware and Launch Malwarebytes' Anti-Malware, then click Finish.
* If an update is found, it will download and install the latest version.
* Once the program has loaded, select Perform full scan, then click Scan.
* When the scan is complete, click OK, then Show Results to view the results.
* Be sure that everything is checked, and click Remove Selected.
Malwarebytes' Anti-Malware

Try going to control panel add remove programs and see if you see things that could be eliminated from the pc. Also make sure the recycle bin is actually being emptied.

Use ATF
Please download ATF Cleaner by Atribune from
http://www.atribune.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=25&Itemid=25
Save it to your Desktop.

Run ATF Cleaner

* Double-click ATF-Cleaner.exe to run the program.
* Click Select All found at the bottom of the list.
* Click the Empty Selected button.
* Click Exit on the Main menu to close the program.
* Shutdown/restart the computer.

let me know if any of that helped

Hi, Ravencajun

Thanks for the response.

Unfortunately, neither of the software programs did much good. Malwarebytes found one, small item and the ATF cleaner had little to remove, since I ran CCleaner earlier.

And I found no unfamiliar items in the add/remove programs list.

I did notice, fwiw, that the Malwarebytes software (like the Avast scan I mentioned above) seemed to take a whole lot of time in the Windows\Installer folder/files. Don't know if that means anything.

Any other comments/suggestions welcome !

This microsoft page may help.

Thanks, Bob, for the link. I'll check it out more thoroughly tomorrow and see if it helps get things squared away.

I had the same problem with a computer recently. I opened Windows Explorer and checked each folders properties until I found the one that was the biggest user. It was the Program Files and I checked each program in there until I found the one. I then took the necessary action to get rid of some of the files in that program.

Good Luck
Smitty

The fact that Avast scanned 100 of the 27 gig on the drive tells me there may be some invalid directory listings. Go into My Computer, right click the C: drive and select properties. Then go to the tools tab and click the Check Now button. Then check both the checkboxes on the next screen and click start now. It will give you a message that it has to be in exclusive mode (I forget the wording) and that it will run the next time you restart Windows.

Reboot and let it run through the entire check process.

This may not be the problem, but my dad once suddenly found himself almost out of disk space and this process fixed things for him.

Thanks for the reply, Smitty.

I did what you said, but checked in C:\Windows since that's where I suspect the problem lies. But first, I right-clicked 'Windows' in the folder list and clicked 'properties' to see what the total size was. As the numbers racked up it kept climbing hundreds of megabytes, then gigabytes. At one point I saw ut jump from just over one GB to 16 GB (!) and it kept going til it reached 18 GB ! And it listed 20,000 files in 2000 folders. So, now I'll be spending some time trying to track things down further.

Thanks again. :-)

Posted by bpgreen (My Page) on Sat, Sep 6, 08 at 23:20

The fact that Avast scanned 100 of the 27 gig on the drive tells me there may be some invalid directory listings. Go into My Computer, right click the C: drive and select properties. Then go to the tools tab and click the Check Now button. Then check both the checkboxes on the next screen and click start now. It will give you a message that it has to be in exclusive mode (I forget the wording) and that it will run the next time you restart Windows.

Reboot and let it run through the entire check process.

This may not be the problem, but my dad once suddenly found himself almost out of disk space and this process fixed things for him.

Thanks for the information.

I tried the scan. (I usually do it by putting "chkdsk /f" in Start > Run, which only goes through 3 stages at reboot; but doing it your way took it through 5 stages, so was more thorough. Nevertheless,....) Nothing showed up as being in error.

My aunt took the computer to a knowledgeable friend of hers who could not discover the actual source of the problem, but was able to recover some space, so she's now at 3 GB of free space instead of 217 MB. Unfortunately, it's still below the "15%" needed to do a defrag, but at least it's more "usuable" until it can be looked at more thoroughly.

just to make sure he is not botted try running this free scan
Trend Micro RUBotted

Hi, ravencajun

Thanks for the suggestion. Good news: found no bots. Bad news: still have no idea what caused the sudden (if it was sudden) consumption of space.

I did (barely) manage to get the defragger to run. (It needs 15% space and the laptop has only 14.) It came up with about 20 files that it said it couldn't defrag, all of them (not surprisingly) in the Windows\Installer folder that has held my interest since this began, and interestingly the 20 "undefraggable" files were listed as being 114 meg each. I realize that amount doesn't quite explain the GBs worth of space taken up, but it's probably one more piece of the puzzle.

I tried googling the file names/numbers but couldn't find anything. I tried to post a 'snapshot' of the defrag summary I'm talking about, but it didn't register the pic in the preview. Maybe I'll try later.

Thanks again for the comments !