Bloated Recent Folder

[bill]

Win XP Pro sp2

My Recent folder shows 200 Gb of silly named files and folders with
meaningless filetypes and dates ( my hard disk is only 30 GB ). I cannot
delete them, it says " cannot read from the source file or disk"

I tried to restart in Safe Mode to delete them, never tried this before, and
a screen full of driver info stared at me for a full 5 minutes and nothing
happened.

Not sure if the problems are related or not but can anybody help me. I
googled quite a bit but found nothing useful.

Did a scan with AVG up to date - scan spyware and spybot with no success.


TIA
Bill

 

[Alias]

Win XP Pro sp2

My Recent folder shows 200 Gb of silly named files and folders with
meaningless filetypes and dates ( my hard disk is only 30 GB ). I cannot
delete them, it says " cannot read from the source file or disk"

I tried to restart in Safe Mode to delete them, never tried this before, and
a screen full of driver info stared at me for a full 5 minutes and nothing
happened.

Not sure if the problems are related or not but can anybody help me. I
googled quite a bit but found nothing useful.

Did a scan with AVG up to date - scan spyware and spybot with no success.


TIA
Bill

Try using Crap Cleaner. Get it at www.ccleaner.com Use it in Normal Mode
and if you can get into Safe Mode after that, use it in the
Administrator's account. Just use the Cleaner feature, NOT the Issues
feature.

Alias

 

[R. McCarty]

You're dealing with MRU tables ( Most Recently Used ).
The link below has a tool that can be used to clean/purge
the MRUs.
http://windowsxp.mvps.org/mrublaster.htm

 

[bill]

Thanx guys but neither of these programs did any good.
Any more offers ??

 

[R. McCarty]

Maybe log in with another Administrator level account and try to
delete the Recent content from that profile
\Documents and Settings\'Name'\My Recent Docs
*Just make sure you are working on the correct folder.

 

[bill]

Thanx again guys. I found on another thread the idea to use CHKDSK /F and it
worked like a charm. The bad Recent folder disappeared completely and was
replaced with a My Recent Documents folder.
All is now well.