huge file in HP folder

[Gerry Prich]

I recently had a customer who claimed his hard drive became "full" literally
overnight. He has a year old Dell with a 160 GB drive that had just under
40 GB used. This system has XP Pro, and is updated with SP2. It started
crawling and thrashing, and I asked him to check the drive capacity, and he
said it showed 95% + filled! After I did an initial inspection, & turned
off the startup folder, I couldn't find any infections - he had both Norton
and MS Anti-Spyware running, both reporting clean scans. I did an additional
scan with AVG, which also found nothing. I did a check for large files and
found a (just shy of) 120 GB file reported in a HP update folder. The only
HP item on the system is a scanner/printer. I have never run into a single
file taking up so much space. After deleting the file, the system returned
to normal, just like nothing had happened. He has SBC Yahoo DSL for a
provider.

Anyone ever heard of this happening? Just curious what could cause this
kind of thing - any preventative measures that can be taken?

Gerry Prich

 

[Jim]

I recently had a customer who claimed his hard drive became "full"
literally overnight. He has a year old Dell with a 160 GB drive that had
just under 40 GB used. This system has XP Pro, and is updated with SP2. It
started crawling and thrashing, and I asked him to check the drive
capacity, and he said it showed 95% + filled! After I did an initial
inspection, & turned off the startup folder, I couldn't find any
infections - he had both Norton and MS Anti-Spyware running, both reporting
clean scans. I did an additional scan with AVG, which also found nothing. I
did a check for large files and found a (just shy of) 120 GB file reported
in a HP update folder. The only HP item on the system is a
scanner/printer. I have never run into a single file taking up so much
space. After deleting the file, the system returned to normal, just like
nothing had happened. He has SBC Yahoo DSL for a provider.

Anyone ever heard of this happening? Just curious what could cause this
kind of thing - any preventative measures that can be taken?

Gerry Prich

Tell your customer to quit using two virus scanners. More than one leads to
system instability (they try to kill each other).

As for the big file, did you manage to catch its name before you deleted it?
If you did, then perhaps HP could tell you where it came from (or even some
of the experts here).

If you don't have the name, chances of finding out whence it came are rather
slim.

Jim

 

[Alan]

I recently had a customer who claimed his hard drive became "full"
literally overnight. He has a year old Dell with a 160 GB drive that had
just under 40 GB used. This system has XP Pro, and is updated with SP2. It
started crawling and thrashing, and I asked him to check the drive
capacity, and he said it showed 95% + filled! After I did an initial
inspection, & turned off the startup folder, I couldn't find any
infections - he had both Norton and MS Anti-Spyware running, both reporting
clean scans. I did an additional scan with AVG, which also found nothing. I
did a check for large files and found a (just shy of) 120 GB file reported
in a HP update folder. The only HP item on the system is a
scanner/printer. I have never run into a single file taking up so much
space. After deleting the file, the system returned to normal, just like
nothing had happened. He has SBC Yahoo DSL for a provider.

Anyone ever heard of this happening? Just curious what could cause this
kind of thing - any preventative measures that can be taken?

Gerry Prich

Printers can need to render pages for the printer, perhaps this was being
done and for some reason wasn't deleted after printing. Perhaps the computer
crashed leaving the file behind. Perhaps ........

 

[Rock]

Tell your customer to quit using two virus scanners. More than one leads to
system instability (they try to kill each other).

Having two AV programs installed is not a problem. Only one should be
set for active protection though.