Help!!! Something is totally messed up with my computer.a few days ago i started getting those windows popup balloons saying "low hard disk space, click here to free up more space" (or something to that effect)... i thought it was normal, since i only had 3.5 GB on the drive and 2GB was taken by WinXP, and the rest was some applications... so i kept emptying my recycling bin, temp folders, etc. but yesterday it seemed that everytime i clean up my drive, 5 minutes later i get a message that it's full again. so i check. and i only have a few hundred KB left on my drive. and after that, every few minutes i check, the free space has gone down. i scanned my drive, no virus. i tried defragging my drive, but i needed at least 15% free space on my drive, so i moved some directories, resulting in 800 MB free space. so as i was defragging it, i noticed something really wierd. the defragg window displays the current free space of the drive right? well mine said 800MB... 799MB... 798MB... 796MB... you get the picture. i keep losing 1MB every second... everytime i free up some space i lose it within 5 minutes. i tried investigating where all that space went to, but i couldn't find anything. I have no idea what else i need to do... :( (other than reformat my drive) I suspect i either have a virus, or just some really nasty bug. (for the record, i downloaded a windows update (Q306676) a few days ago, maybe has something to do with it?) one other thing, suddenly some files won't run anymore (i get the "... is not a valid win32 application"). i'm totally lost. help. anyone. please.

o wait, forgot something. my drive usually reaches 0 bytes free, and then for some reason, a little while later it frees up between 1MB-4MB... and takes it away again, and gives it back....etc

Hi Kevin: It sounds to me like you have a computer virus. There are several strains out there that will deplete your hard drive space bit by bit. There is a virus known as Kazaa or the Benjamin virus that will do this. I would suggest you update your anti-virus software to the current definitions and re-scan your computer. If you haven't updated your AV software in quite sometime then more than likely it didn't catch it. Try that. Hope it helps.

hi kevin, you may also want to check for trojan horses, so just in case go to www.pcflank.com and get a free trojan scan. Cause you never know, someone else maybe using your puter for all kinds of different reasons. cheers, murve

read up on the klez virus as well it actually disables your antivirus software yet leaves the tray icon so you think its working and then infrects the av software so when you scan your hard drive your actually spreading the virus further read up on what to do if its that one also it might not by a virus at all but virutal memory alocation in xp its under one of the tabs in device manager to manually allocate how much hd space is used by the computer for virtual memmory reduce the ammount and see if that fixes it xp has a nasty habbit of increasing the amount used with little warning on a small hd like yours it could easilly have used way to much and this could be why your memmory amount varies the amount allocated by windows is a variable (100-150 as an example) as it call on more your memmory would show as less etc.

The same exact thing happened to me after trying to download a nintendo emulator from Kazaa. I have found that over time, up to 4057 files appear in the C:/windows/temp folder and if you delete them, they come back within minutes. Its as if there is a program constantly running and downloading the files on to my computer. What should I do?

Do an online virus scan from HouseCall_AV so that you know you have done an up to date virus scan. It can not remove a virus, but it will tell you if you have one.