I want to view the index.dat file in my cookies folder, but when I try to open it I get a message that says: Windows can not find Program.exe. This program is needed for opening filed of type 'DAT File'. I tried Spider already. It didn't work. It came up with some type of error message also (I forgot what it said.)

Ellis, I have QuickView Plus and receive an error message stating that the file is being used. Within Explorer I right clicked and dragged it to my desktop and selected Copy Here. I said Yes to the question about moving or copying from IE Zones. I then Right clicked and Renamed it to index.txt and ignored the warning. Amongst the jibberish text I could read what I could already see within the Cookies folder. Bryan

download spider if you want to view and delete your dat files. Here is the link http://www.webattack.com/get/spider.shtml

Look at them in DOS with a text editor. They're "in use" by Explorer and usually cannot be accessed with Explorer running.

You can see in "read only" the content of all index.dat while running Windows. I use Windows Commander, a file manager which has a powerful lister. http://www.ghisler.com Pierre.

Pierre, Thanks for the suggestion to use Windows Commander. Iwas able to view the contents of the index.dat files finally, which is more than I have been able to do up to this point. However, the file is in a format that consists of mostly symbols and other gibberish, with scattered URL's, web-sites, etc., that can be read throughout. Does all the gibberish translate into something? If so, is there a way to change the format so that it is readable? Ellis

Hi Ellis, you are entering the twilight zone ! MS is known to keep secrets about Windows. As far as I know, the index.dat (under Content.IE5) contains the information you see when you use Explorer to look at \Temporary Internet Files. I mean the file type, the file size, the name in the cache, the real name with the entire url, the expiration date of the file, the last visit date, the last modification date. The "reply" button on the top of this page is described in my index.dat as follows http://www.computing.net/windows95/wwwboard/reply.gif reply[1].gif HTTP/1.1 200 OK ETag: "1d22ce-55a-3624f5bb" Content-Length: 1370 Content-Type: image/gif I don't know what the ETag means, maybe the dates. Sometimes, I forget the name of a site but I remember a portion of the url. Then I open the index.dat with the Lister Windows Commander and with the search command (F7), I look for my url. But for the rest, there is nothing to find out in the index.dat. I delete regularly the index.dat under Content.IE5 and I've noticed that the "memory in use" (according to sysmon) is lower after the delete and the re-creation of the file. It means this file is read at startup and stays in memory, which is strange because I don't surf each time I start my PC. If you are interested, here is a link to a very useful german site (but everything is in English). Click here They have some programs to look at history, cache but they are shareware, I've not tried them. Here is an excerpt about undocumented data structures in the browser cache (Temporary internet files, Index.dat file) Typical URL entry in index.dat As the string length of URLs is not constant, the offset of some items may vary. The following offset values from the start of the entry are constant, however: Number of folder...0x3C for IE4, 0x38 for IE5 URL string...0x68 for IE4, 0x60 for IE5 This string is terminated by one zero byte and the next full dword (4 bytes) starts with the file name. The intermediate bytes, if any, are filled by zero bytes also. Practical example of off-line browsing The following example is only intended as an exercise to test understanding of index file structure. You can open any file in the browser cache only from the index.dat file without the browser history or the explorer. Open index.dat file with any hex editor. Locate the file name, e.g., 'programm.gif' in fig. 3. Locate the number of the cache folder for this file at offset 0x3C from the start of entry, e.g., '02'. Locate the name of the corresponding folder starting at offset 0x50 from beginning of file. In this example you must use the third folder name as index of folders starts at zero. The name of this folder for the example shown in fig. 2 is 'P7YWR4V3'. Now you can enter the complete path to the file in the address bar of Internet Explorer ® 4.0 as follows: 'E:\Windows\TEMPORARY INTERNET FILES\1\P7YWR4V3\programm.gif'. End of excerpt. HTH. Sorry for the basic English. Pierre.