Weird little files

[Technocratic]

This may be something very basic that I'm just not aware of...

In any directory involved with my VB projects (project directory, exe output directory, whatever) there always appears tons of tiny little files with names like "Taa01656" and "Tab01872" every time I do anything. They're only a few bytes and when I open them with notepad it's just something like this:



D007 jsmith JSMITH ¾­
D ¾­

my Win2000 login name and a few other odd things...

What are these and how can I stop them from polluting my system? If I don't keep deleting them, their quantity gets out of control!

Any insight appreciated!
Thanks

"Do I know what rhetorical means?!"

 

[Technocratic]

I'll just bump this one time... I guess it's not all that big of a deal, but I'm still really curious about it... no one has ever seen this happen?

I just had another 11 of these stupid files pop up in the past 15 minutes.. it's very odd... and a bit annoying!

 

[rdavis]

Are you talking about your project folder? If so, I've seen these temp files pop up usually when VB crashes or my app crashes with a GPF error. Otherwise when everything closes properly, they disappear.

Rob

 

[Technocratic]

Yes, they do show up in the project folder, but also other places... and they don't seem to go away when VB is closed, or finished running the program, or anything.

and my VB isn't crashing or acting unusual in any way.

I was thinking maybe I had some odd settings changed, or something is going on that I don't know about.

But, like I said, it's not a real big deal... I just was wondering if someone might know off the top of their head.
If not, I'm content to let this go... thanks for responding

threads sure do sink fast on this forum!

 

[Devin]

These look a whole lot like klez or bugbear file names. You might have a worm, and if so, it seems to be quickly reaching critical mass. If you do not have McAfee or similarly reputable and updated virus protection software, then I would strongly suggest you stop everything immediately and go get some. If you find something, or even if you don't, consider downloading the klez and bugbear removal tools from symantec. It can't hurt to run them and see what they find. Good luck. Report your results for us to see.

I'm paranoid about this stuff, though. Sometimes the removal tools don't completely work. If it were my system, and I could spare the time, I would back up every user file, repartition and format the harddrive, and reinstall everything. In fact, I do that to all my windows boxes annually, else they tend to gradually deteriorate and pick up little eccentricities that only a MS OS developer could ever hope to track down.

 

[Technocratic]

Devin,
Wow, that's not an answer I expected!
I scanned just now with Norton Anti-virus, and my definitions are up to date (1/29), but I've had these things appearing for quite a while, and I run anti-virus once a week and haven't seen anything. but of course, it might be possible they do not know about this particular bug or variation

I suppose this situation could be suspect because of the fact that it's my login name appearing in these files! (Name changed to protect the innocent
Conversely, it seems weird that it only happens when there's activity with VB... compiling, saving, debugging, etc

just ran the bugbear and klez removal tools and it was clean.

As far as reinstalling everything, yes, that's often a good idea, I do the same with my computers too (my Win98 PC became almost unusable after a year!). maybe I'll do this one early, and see what happens.

Thanks for the info, better safe than sorry!