Something eating HD space?

So my girlfriend's computer is acting weird.

The Windows folder is showing up as being ~15GB. However, when she opens the folder and selects all files (hidden files are set to being visible) it only adds up to ~3.5GB.

She cleaned off ~700MB of stuff from the drive yesterday, and before she even shut down something had eaten up 100MB of space on the drive. Ran Spybot and AVG with the newest definitions and nothing showed up. Recycle bin is empty. We moved the page file onto another partition a week ago, so it isn't that. Temporary internet files and temp files from Windows have both been purged a few times, and that doesn't fix the problems. She also ran a disk cleanup and it didn't really free up much space. The drive has also been defragmented by O&O Defrag back down to around 0% fragmentation. Nothing is in My Documents. All of the other folders are showing up fine, and there's only her profile and the Administrator one (which isn't used).

I've heard of viruses that go into your recycle bin and eat up space, but AVG hasn't found anything, so I don't know if it would be that.

Any ideas?

Jam it back in, in the dark.

I linked girlfriend to the thread last night, and here's what she had to say.

Quote:

I found a subfolder called Installer that doesn't appear in the Windows folder even when I make hidden files visible. It contains about 12 GB of Windows Patch Installer files (1203 objects total). So I guess that is the problem area. I searched for it online and found a few posts talking about similar problems, but I can't find a single solution. Most of the installers say they're for Office and have alphanumeric names like 24e7de3. I disabled automatic updates for now, but I don't know whether it's safe to delete those files.

I'm thinking it might be a good idea to maybe reinstall MS Office? Also, since I know she'll read this thread, have you fixed that problem with your computer not wanting to install that Windows update properly? Maybe it's a MS Office update that kept on trying to install every time you'd shut your computer down and somehow got way out of hand?

Also, spacemonger is pretty sweet; I didn't realize I had copies of mIRC with >2GB of automatically generated chat logs on three of my harddrives.

There's nowhere I can't reach.

From girlfriend.

Quote:

The msizap tool cleared up 8 GB of space on the drive. There was an issue with the product key not being found for some of the files, but these only take up 400 MB. My Windows folder is now 4 GB with 1 GB being consumed by the system32 folder. At least I won't have that annoying disk cleanup utility running continuously. Hopefully it stays this way. Tell your friends thanks for the help.

Looks good so far, we'll see what happens after a week or so of use. If it happens again, I think reinstalling MS Office is the way to go. Thanks zerg and ryu.

This thing is sticky, and I don't like it. I don't appreciate it.

Guess I should post an update. Her computer's been running great since we tried what you guys suggested. It looks like Windows kept on download updates it already had since it kept on freezing on one of them every time she'd try to upgrade. I forget if she disabled updates entirely or not, but she doesn't have to install every last MS update now that she's not that school's network anymore.

I am a dolphin, do you want me on your body?