[The Skeptic]

You said in your first post that you reset the computer to factory settings. Normally part of the process is reformatting the hard disk. If you did format then you should know exactly what you have on your computer, and you shouldn't have any old unfamiliar files. If you did not format the disk then this is a different story.

Judging by your first post my impression is that you meant, from the beginning, to reformat. If I am correct then it would be a lot faster to do it again, taking care to reformat this time.

In a previous post I referred to cluster size. That is very important if you have many small files. In such cases FAT can be very wasteful. If you take my advice and reformat, please make sure to set the file system to NTFS and not to FAT (which is presently the case).

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I just hit F8 or F10 or whatever it is that one hits to restore to factory setings. From there I just went through the setup, choosing a name for the computer, declining help with internet setup, etc. I don't know if that's formatting it, but it's something I've done before with no problem.

I think the main issue now is just getting rid of the 16GB of stuff from other people's computers that a) I shouldn't have access to and b)have no idea how it got on my computer. The problem is that I can't physically locate these files. I get as far as Application Data and then there's nothing. It's tempting to just delete the whole folder and be done with it. Get half my computer back!

[Malinka]

I just hit F8 or F10 or whatever it is that one hits to restore to factory setings. From there I just went through the setup, choosing a name for the computer, declining help with internet setup, etc. I don't know if that's formatting it, but it's something I've done before with no problem.

I think the main issue now is just getting rid of the 16GB of stuff from other people's computers that a) I shouldn't have access to and b)have no idea how it got on my computer. The problem is that I can't physically locate these files. I get as far as Application Data and then there's nothing. It's tempting to just delete the whole folder and be done with it. Get half my computer back!

[Alzeimer]

Deleting Application Data might cause you more problems then solve the ones you have now.

Since it is a new install I would do as suggested and try to reformat again making sure it is reformatting before it installs XP again. If for some reason you are unable to reformat with your recovery option you might have to use a seperate boot program to format your drive and making sure you reformat only drive C: and not to format your recovery partition so you can use it to reinstall XP.

[diabillic]

You said in your first post that you reset the computer to factory settings. Normally part of the process is reformatting the hard disk. If you did format then you should know exactly what you have on your computer, and you shouldn't have any old unfamiliar files. If you did not format the disk then this is a different story.

Judging by your first post my impression is that you meant, from the beginning, to reformat. If I am correct then it would be a lot faster to do it again, taking care to reformat this time.

In a previous post I referred to cluster size. That is very important if you have many small files. In such cases FAT can be very wasteful. If you take my advice and reformat, please make sure to set the file system to NTFS and not to FAT (which is presently the case).

Alot of systems years back would default the filesystem to FAT32, so that's probably the situation in this case.

[123Runner]

EDIT: Problem is I can't find S-1-5-31...etc

That looks like a recycler folder.

Have you run ATF cleaner?

And as indicated, you shouldn't have anything on that drive if you reformatted properly.
Either reformat as suggested since you just did, or, start deleting the files that you know are not yours.