Microsoft word documents corrupted??

Hey,

I have spent the last few days cleaning up my system and one of the things I went through was "show hidden files" (still enabled obviously) so maybe this is normal but it seems really odd to me:

Now there are suddenly loads of pale looking files that when I run the mouse over them they quote files that already exist. For example:

There will be a file called say, "Party 2000!!" there will be another file called "~$rty 2000!!". Rolling the mouse over them they seem to be recognized as the same document!

This doesn't happen for EVERY file but a select few, some file names aren't even the same as an actual file but contain a quote from a document as the file name!

In addition to those there are also tons of TEMP files with titles like: "~WRL0003.tmp"

These files are similar to the others in that if you roll the mouse over them they show document names and dates of other files that exist, except there are often three or four of them with different file numbers but come up listed as the same file.

It seems fishy to me.

Can any one let me know what they think this might be? I'm stumped.

If you need me to clarify anything let me know, I could be more specific.

Thanks a lot for any help!

James
:major

 

Most of those are temp files created when you have Auto-Save enabled, and should self-delete when you close Word or reboot Windows, but they don't always clean up after themselves. (in fact, if you have Auto-save set for every 10 minutes, you might end up with an individual file every 10 minutes!)

Some might be "recovered" files, which are created if Word or Excel crashes --- the application attempts to recover the "unsaved" file. When that happens, the app will show a list of recovered files in the side panel, and ask if you want to save or delete them.

If you aren't trying to recover missing data from any of the temp files, they can be safely deleted, but temp files from the currently active Word session can't be deleted. I often have to do a re-start in order to delete those.

 

All this cleaning is making me paranoid. I'm glad it's nothing.

Thanks again!