What Are They = ~DF tmp Files

[Guest]

OK, this came up in some other groups I monitor.

Just what are the ~DFnnnn.tmp files you your profiles \Local Settings\Temp
folder for?

I note that at least one is in-use each logon and the accumulate. Only the
older dated of these files can be deleted.

 

[Pegasus \(MVP\)]

OK, this came up in some other groups I monitor.

Just what are the ~DFnnnn.tmp files you your profiles \Local Settings\Temp
folder for?

I note that at least one is in-use each logon and the accumulate. Only the
older dated of these files can be deleted.

Some application on your machine creates them, perhaps
your virus scanner. Because it is poorly engineered, it then
forgets to delete them.

 

[Roger Hunt]

Tecknomage wrote

OK, this came up in some other groups I monitor.

Just what are the ~DFnnnn.tmp files you your profiles \Local Settings\Temp
folder for?

I note that at least one is in-use each logon and the accumulate. Only the
older dated of these files can be deleted.

They are very likely to be temporary working files created by a
Microsoft Office program like Word, and for some reason they are not
being tidied up when the document is closed.
(They do remain and accumulate if Office crashes, or the computer. There
may well be other reasons too, which I can't think of off-hand.)
If you rename a few with a .doc extension they may turn out to be Word
documents, or possibly Excel files.

This is all I know from my personal experience of ~DFnnnn.tmp files and
it might be that a completely different process is creating them, but I
hope this is of some use.

 

[Tecknomage]

Some application on your machine creates them, perhaps
your virus scanner. Because it is poorly engineered, it then
forgets to delete them.

Well, it's not a "normal" application like Word, Notepad, etc. The new
version of these files appear just after loading the desktop. That
means it's generated by a service or other boot-load software like
antivirus.

 

[Tecknomage]

Tecknomage wrote

They are very likely to be temporary working files created by a
Microsoft Office program like Word, and for some reason they are not
being tidied up when the document is closed.
(They do remain and accumulate if Office crashes, or the computer. There
may well be other reasons too, which I can't think of off-hand.)
If you rename a few with a .doc extension they may turn out to be Word
documents, or possibly Excel files.

It is not a user run application like Word or Excel. These files
appear at boot and after loading the desktop, before any application
is run.