hp pavilion 7940
he noticed his hard drive getting close to full and this HD is 40 GB! and he doesnt play games with huge graphics or dl mp3s ot video clips. none of that

he thought it was a virus he couldnt detect at first
and had norton antivirus 2002 and updated regularly
he used FULL system restore a 4 times about 4 months ago with the recovery CD
and after a month after each restore he would have this full disk again
he even formatted C drive a couple months ago and then recover

he ran scandisk many times standard. no problems
he ran scandisk thorough( i told him to) to see if there were physical errors on the hard drive

i have heard of certain viruses that can cause this, but can a virus stay on your pc even after u full restore
at first i thought it was a hard drive problem but after scandisk thorough says nothing. i dont know what to think
can anyone help us here?

could it be a new type of spyware?browser hijack?adware?
are there certain viruses that can do that that are at least 4 months old that stay on your hard drive even after u so full restore and wipe out everything u had on it?

opps i didnt type in everything
this is my Friends computer, not mine and he told me he has had this problem for a while now. lol sorry

There are virus that can do that to you, but you would have to be getting re-infected. You need to find out what folder(s) are filling up and taking up the disk space. Check the C:\Windows\TEMP folder first. Everything in there can be deleted.

Try running the System Tools - Disk CleanUp program and see if that helps.

If he does a lot of installing and removing of programs, then it could be a problem with System Restore. Go to Control Panel, System icon, Performance tab, File System button, and in the File System Properties, move the "System Restore" slider from MAX end to about 1/3 of the way from the MIN end. Make sure the size show 900MB or more. After the system stops removing excess old System Restore files, check and see if there is now a lot of free space showing on the disk drive.

i had a feeling he needed to get reinfected.ty,ill tell my freind to try it. if it doesnt work i will post either a new POST or add to this one
i am wondering, maybe the hard drive is damaged in a way that it cant be detected or fixed with scandisk.
is there any other good disk scanners out there