I am posting here because I dont know where else to turn at the moment. I have been having a problem with my computer that I cannot figure out.

I have win xp and my hard drive is literalyl vanishign while I watch. For example: I deleted nearly 7 gigs worth of stuff from it and checked properties on it, and during the course of a half hour it dropped from 7 gigs to approximately 8megs all by itself.

I have not downloaded anything, but I have noticed for some time my space has been vanishing on me. I have msn internet service and it has been creating duplicate emails at an alarming rate. I m not sure if this is the culprit or not but when I deleted it i suddenly had 6 gigs back.

Since then I put it back on and the hard drive went down to 2.5 gig. I uninstalled it once mroe and the hard disk size stayed the same.

I cannot do a system restore as I turned it off in hopes that space would magically appear. I have defragged my drive. I have run a new version of spybot. I have cleaned it out with ccleaner (got about 380 meg out of this- which sumarily, is now gone). I have run both add/remove programs and disk cleanup. Ran anti virus programs as well (nothing came up). I even called my internet carrier who told me theyd never seen this before. She watched and laughed as through remote diagnostics she saw my email count go from 0 to 10 thousand in amatter of minutes (replicating old emails and not allowing deletions)

Im literally perplexed by this. I am not sure if msn has soemthing to do with it or if it happens to just be a result of a larger prolem that I happened to catch.

Has anyone else had this problem? Multiple gigabytes vanishing as I sit there and watch is a little disheartening... I have no idea where to go next and am at my wits end.

Howdy,

I strongly recommend that you follow CastleCops' Malware Removal and Prevention procedure, a system CastleCops devised to enable users to either partially, or fully clean their systems without the direct aid of an expert.

Please read these instructions carefully.

You will find the Malware Removal and Prevention Procedure here. If that doesn't fix the problem, then go to this Forum, read the instructions at the top of the page carefully also following these instructions
and one of CC's trained 1st Responders or Security Experts will help you.

Note to everyone: You must be a CastleCops member to post for help in the HJT forum.