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Wednesday 11 August 2010

Ada-ware Ate My Hard Drive

I was running some PC admin software on my computer last night and noticed that it seemed very interested in the contents of one particular directory. The directory in question was:

Documents and Setting/user/local files/temp

The program, CC Cleaner, failed to do anything with the directory. I chose to look at it myself in more detail. What I found nearly knocked me of my chair. There were over 65,000 .tmp files in there, totalling just over 17GB of space 8-s

Being .tmp file I knew I could just blow them away, which would free up all that waisted space. However, Windows XP couldn't cope with deleting 65k files in one hit and promptly threw it's legs in the air. I ended up clearing them out in batches on 2000 at a time. Took me ages it did.

But what had caused it? I googled the file name "adannnn.tmp", nnnn was a unique number for each file. It turns out that it was caused by Ada-ware, an anti spyware program I use. Every time MS Outlook (my email program) downloads emails, an Ada-ware plugin scans them & produces lots of .tmp files. It should delete these files when it's done, but quite obviously it isn't!

I tested it, and in a 20 sec period it produced over 1000 of these .tmp files.

The solution was simple. Disable the plugin, which I did and all is now well 8-)

I just hope it stays that way!

Regards
Chris
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