[CelestialTeardrop]

My Norton virus scan was running far too slowly (it was at 6500 files for 48 minutes, when it ususally scans 194,000 in 22-25 minutes), and I noticed it was scanning the Google folder in Program Files for a while. I looked it up under My Computer, and there are 20,000+ files (extension .tmp). Is it normal for all these files to be there? On my laptop, the only thing in the Google folder under Program Files is a folder for Google Earth.

Any info would be appreciated.

Thanks in advance.

p.s.
When I ran Panda ActiveScan, the scan got through 17 files before running into the google folder, after which it did not move and I had to shut it down through the task manager because the window froze.

A similar thing happened with panda activescan on my laptop: after scanning about 114,000 files, it came to bteuclid.dll and did not budge for 20 minutes, at which point I shut it down through the task manager as well.

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you have a google folder, do you have google desktop installed?

I would use cleanup! to remove all the temp files from your system. it should run much faster after that.

[starjax]

you have a google folder, do you have google desktop installed?

I would use cleanup! to remove all the temp files from your system. it should run much faster after that.

[CelestialTeardrop]

No, I do not have google desktop. The only things I have from google are Google Earth and the google toolbar for Internet Explorer.

As soon as I get to my computer, I will run cleanup.

However, I'm curious as to the origin and purpose of all those .tmp files. For the past week, I have been using my laptop, not my desktop (which is the one with the large number of .tmp files in the Google folder). The last action performed before I shut down the desktop last time was to run a Norton scan, and all went (seemingly) well. Then when I turned it on yesterday, the scan went too slowly, as I said above.

The only thing I did before the Norton scan was to run a Panda ActiveScan, which also froze at the google entries. (My laptop appears to have some resilient adware, so I wanted to make sure my desktop was not also infected, thus the reason for my running so many scans when I had not been using it for the past week.)

[starjax]

just remember google earth is still in beta. they may have pushed an update to it, not sure. the pc that I have it on sits behind a few firewalls and I haven't noticed issues with it. you might need to unintall it it they return after cleanup has been run.

[CelestialTeardrop]

The .tmp files are not in the Google Earth folder, but the "Google" folder (which contains another folder in it for Google Earth). The .tmp files are associated with the google toolbar (Google IE Client Toolbar) version 3.0.125.1

My guess as to why they appear now is that they are a part of the lastest version of the toolbar (3.0.125.1), and since google automatically downloads the newest update for the toolbar without alerting the user the files must have downloaded as soon as I turned on my comp and opened IE.

The 3.0.125.1 version must be the newest one available because it is not yet in the version history.

[starjax]

yea, I think your right. I just did a fresh install of the google toolbar and it went into the root of c:\program files\google instead of \google\toolbar like in previous versions.

[CelestialTeardrop]

Ok, I figured out where the files are coming from (.tmp), but not why.

I deleted all the files from the Google folder, and then went to run Panda ActiveScan. Again, it froze when it came to googletoolbar1.dll and I had to shut it down via task manager. When I looked in the Google folder, the files were back.

So Panda ActiveScan puts the .tmp files in the folder of the last item scanned before being shut down in a way other than the "stop scan" button (the "stop scan" button did not respond when I tried to click on it; maybe if the scan is stopped using that button it cleans up any temporary files it creates).

Still, there is the mystery of why the scan freezes over the toolbar.

I tried to uninstall the toolbar, but although the uninstall was successful, the googletoolbar1.dll file remained in the Google folder and had to be deleted manually.

Edited by CelestialTeardrop, 06 October 2005 - 01:50 PM.