Disk Cleanup really cleaned up - no files left!

[Wally]

I had a really strange thing happen on the weekend. I
used the Disk Cleanup utility and browsed through all the
options and saw a Content & Indexing Service entry in the
list of things I could cleanup.

Well.... The cleanup took a while and then my icons all
started to disappear. Eventually, I had only my
wallpaper and an empty taskbar in front of me; no links
to anything!

I did a reboot and got a message on a missing or
corrupted file hal.dll. When I eventually got the system
booted from a spare ME floppy (I had used FAT32 on
C:\drive) I saw there were no files left on the system,
only a couple of empty directory.

THATS ONE HECK OF A CLEAN UP....

Why is the Content & Indexing Service even listed in Disk
Clean up?
Why does Windows allow itself to be deleted?

 

[Rocket J. Squirrel]

Sorry, but Disk Cleanup didn't cause your problem.

First things first: The Indexing Service aids file searches by creating
indexes of all files on disk. Some people find this very helpful, however,
the creation of indexes is processor intensive and thus can slow your
system's performance. For this reason, many users turn off the Indexing
Service. (I uninstalled the thing altogether.)

As the "Description" box on Disk Cleanup explains: "These files are left
over from a previous indexing operation and can be deleted safely." Disk
Cleanup only removes previous indexes.

If your computer got hosed, the most likely explanation is that you had a
virus that was not set to trigger until the next restart. Viruses sometimes
do this as a way of throwing you off their trail. Since many users have no
reason to restart their computers for quite some time, they might not even
realize they had a virus.

Rocky

 

[Rocket J. Squirrel]

The major antivirus software writers have online virus encyclopedia's that
you can consult. For example, for Symantec (Norton Antivirus) products you
can look here:
http://securityresponse.symantec.com/. See especially the "Reference Area"
near the bottom of the page.

Rocky

Thanks for the comments Rocky.

As I have an up to date virus killer (NOD32), I think blaming a virus as

the cause doesn't ring true. Do you know of any specific viruse names that
kick in at the exact time of a disk cleanup?

I think I will follow suit, however, on the Indexing Service as I very

rarely search my system for anything that I know of. It will shortly be a
thing of the past for me as well.