[crudler]

Hi,
I have a 300gb drive, with 153.840gb free.
Free space is just disappearing at a rate of about 300mb every 5 mins, and I have no idea why.
I have checked for viruses, spyware etc, nothing (I run AVG) and used HijackThis to look for dodgy processes. Nothing.
I then tried killing processes one by one until the space stopped dissapearing, still nothing (I was left with only critical windows processes that I cannot kill).

But, after I reboot, my free space is back to normal again (but carries on decreasing).

How can I solve this?
Help!

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How much RAM do you have? Could this be your pagefile? Go to Start menu, right-click Computer, select Properties. On the left side, select Advanced System Settings. Then click the Advanced Tab, and I think the top Settings button is the performance settings. Click Settings, then go to the Advanced tab again, then the Change button. Click on your Vista partition, if you can, and tell us what settings you see checked below, as well as the total paging file size for all drives.

Open this again in 10-15 minutes and see if that total paging file size has changed.

[The Admiral]

How much RAM do you have? Could this be your pagefile? Go to Start menu, right-click Computer, select Properties. On the left side, select Advanced System Settings. Then click the Advanced Tab, and I think the top Settings button is the performance settings. Click Settings, then go to the Advanced tab again, then the Change button. Click on your Vista partition, if you can, and tell us what settings you see checked below, as well as the total paging file size for all drives.

Open this again in 10-15 minutes and see if that total paging file size has changed.

[crudler]

(Sorry forgot to mention I am using XP)
Ok, I only have the 1 drive

Space Available: 156832mb
System Managed Size is selected

Total Paging file size for all drives
--------------------------------------

Minimum allowed: 2mb
Recommended: 1534
Currently allocated: 1535

These values dont change over 10-15 minutes (except for available space which is dropping all the time)

[The Admiral]

Sorry, my bad.

Do you have an automated backup program, or Norton 360?

[crudler]

No,
Nothing of the sorts.
I have dissabled many processes hoping one of them was maybe creating massive temp files.
No luck.

something I have noticed,
windows sees my free space as 148gb,
a quick app i wrote also see 148gb (and dropping)
a 3rd party tool i played with (Tree Size professional from Jam Sotware) reports 154gb (the correct amount - and stable)

my app uses win api method GetDiskFreeSpaceEx (which i suspect so doeswindows explorer). This 3rd party app is seeing my free space differently. Strange.....

[The Admiral]

What happens in Safe Mode? Same disappearing space?

[crudler]

yup, just keeps going down.

But, i just figured it out now.
I downloaded an Open File Viewer from nirsoft (http://www.nirsoft.n...files_view.html)
I could see that I a 15gb file was open, and growing fast. The file was c:\windows\system32\logfiles\wmi\trace.log
googling it said it is from a boot monitoring program called MS BootVis. I don't remeber installing it, and it didn't serve any purpose (apart from giving me grey hairs) so I uninstalled it, rebooted, and problem solved.



Thanks for the help