Getting rid of 150,000 extraneous temporary internet files

W

William W. Collier

After restarting my machine and doing Disk Cleanup (and leaving
zero Temp files and zero Temporary Internet Files), I find this
situation using either Internet Explorer (IE) or Windows Explorer
(WE):

At this location:

C:\Documents and Settings\wwc\Local Settings\Temp\Temporary Internet
Files

there is one subfolder, CONTENT.IE5, which contains four subfolders, each
with one
file. ('wwc' is my user name.)

If I click through the directory structure to this location:

C:\Documents and Settings\wwc\Local Settings\Temporary Internet Files

I see about 200 files in the righthand window. No subfolders are shown.
However,
if I add these characters to the above address '\CONTENT.IE5', then I see
eight
subfolders.

Each subfolder name is 8 random characters long. Each
subfolder contains between 15,000 and 30,000 files. 98% of these
files has an eight character name starting with 'CA', and each of
the files is zero bytes long. The total number of files under
CONTENT.IE5 is over 150,000; I want to get rid of them in order to
speed up Norton Anti-Virus Scan and a disk defragger.

Question 1. Why aren't these files deleted by Disk Cleanup?

Question 2. Will there by any harm if I go in and delete the files
manually (probably in a DOS window)?

Question 3. Why doesn't CONTENT.IE5 show up in the righthand window?

Question 4. Why are there two folders called Temporary Internet Files?

I tried to find the answers to these questions by looking up 'Temporary',
'Internet', and 'Files' in Microsoft's Office XP Inside Out and Windows XP
Inside Out, but to no avail.

Thanks for any help.

Bill Collier

P.S. With all my poking around I now have two copies of CONTENT.IE5
in one window and four copies in another window. Curious.
 
J

Johnny Schmitt

William,

let me know when you find the answer as I have the same problem,...but
worse. In the "explorer" section of "E-Trust Anti-Virus" I can see 24
folders with names like you mentioned containing 130,000 files, but they
don't appear in Windows Explorer and I can't delete them.

Johnny
 
J

Jim Byrd

Hi William and Johnny - In IE6, Tools|Internet Options click on Delete
Files, then check Delete Offline Content, then OK out. The zero length
files are an artifact of Outlook Express. You can also delete all of
this from within OE by using Steve Cochran's OETool, here:
www.oehelp.com

--
Regards, Jim Byrd, MS-MVP
Please respond in original thread in Newsgroup.




In (e-mail address removed), William W. Collier typed:
 
D

Donald Link

You failed to list any virus or firewall or trojan remover programs you have
installed. With computers being hijacked by spammers virus and such it
would not surprise me that you may have some type of virus or trojan.
 

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