HD shows 116 megs out of 28.9 Gigs available

Wow! Like it says I went from 24.8 available out of 28.9 gigs total to 116 megs available OVERNIGHT! I/ve run Adaware and Spybot which show nothing. I've run HiJackThis -- nothing. I ran Avast AV in dep scan mode and it did pick up an old Win 98 viruse (Matya) I googled it (said it was harmless to WinXP machines). I deleted it and Avast now shows me clean. I went to windows update page and all my service packs are up to date along with all the other criticals. I checked disk usage and found that the rerstore points had been diabled because of disk space. I ran defrag. Disk clean up. went to windows help and support and got basically nothing. I've also run CWShredder, The SoBig tool, Novarg FGix and Stinger. The only new thing I've done was download the new free Nero Update and the latest Slimbrowser off of MG last night. Oh yeah I uninstalled the MSvirtualmachine and installed Sun Micro Systems java VM. I'm tired and stumped and about to hit the rack. Any ideas Geeks?
My system:
WinXP, Pentium4, 2.4. 256 Ram, 3 gig WD hd. Liton cdrw, Power DVD,NVidia,

 

Okay guys I gotta get up at O'dark-thirty tomorrow (about 5 hours from now) but I'll check back tomorrow in the late mornng to see if anyone has any thoughts. Right now I'm going to go stand in the shower and moan a bit and let my brain cool off and try, really try, not to go out and pitch the idiot box out of a window
Later,
Bill.

 

Hi Bill just a couple of thoughts
Have you tried running scandisk
Have you used windows explorer and looked at the files on the drive to see what is actually on there

 

Things you might try, pardon the simplicity of some of these, I am trying to be complete:
1) look at your root directory C: and get info on each folder, one should be REALLY BIG
2) empty the trash
3) empty your browser cache
4) post here if you are on a LAN (someone else can load files to your computer)
5) post here if you have broadband and the computer was on all night

 

Yea!

Thanks Geeks. Sorry about being a little (little???) inane last night. But when I jumped on after getting off work today I followed your suggestions and tracked each file in C drive. I found the missing Gigs under Documents and Settings>User>Bill Hayes>Local Settings>Temp. All 21.8 gigs of it! And I found out that the virus was me Seems when I joined the "get Panda AV FREE!" stampede the other night somehow Panda installed 8000 (yep, eight thousand) temp files in the Temp folder. I deleted all of them and POOF my HD went back to 21.8 gigs free. I'm still not sure how it happened, but thanks to you all I think it's all better now As a point of fact I found that Spybot is storing a lot of Check files and Log files in that same directory I'm wondering if it would be all right to delete those also? Just thought, as long as I seem to be making sense again, I'd ask. Anyhow, if any of you guys ever get to San Diego, Ca. ring my door bell and demand the case of beer I owe you. I'll gladly pay.
Again many, many thanks.
Bill

 

And another vote against Panda.

Wiping that temp file shouldn't hurt anything, as anything stored in a "Temp" file is supposed to be just that: temporary. I clean that one out routinely about once a week with no problems. Clean it out with no other programs running, as running programs routinely put things into temp files that they need to run, and are supposed to remove them when they're done, but lots of leftovers get left behind.

 

I think you should just stick with Avast. Seems Panda is more trouble than it's worth for a lot of people.

http://www.majorgeeks.com/vb/showthread.php?t=29613

 

Yeah GT and Can't Come Up, I agree that the usefulness of any proggie is how it works for you and Avast is an AV I feel comfortable with. After the last update it caught some three golden oldies hiding in my archived files. Even though they were all Win98 virii and thus fairly harmless to XP which I run it's still nice to know that my AV thinks it's good thing to inform me of them.
Again guys, many thanks for your help. This place rocks
Bill