4.5 MILLION temporary files created by Symantec Antivirus on C:\

[David Veksler]

Something was eating up disk space on drive C.

I ran windirstat, but it would freeze up on 22% every time.  I figured that some folder had a lot of files.

I found that the mail server log files were 50GB.   OK, deleted, but did not fix the issue.  Then I found 30000 emails in the outgoing queue.  I deleted those.  Apparently the mail server was hacked.  OK, fixed that.

Issue not resolved, which led me to find “Bad Files” (email Quarantee) folder, which had 100,000 emails.  A ha! I thought.  But still something was hanging windirstat.  

I gave windirstat  two more days to finish and saw the below.  You are looking at 4.45 MILLION temporary files in the Symantec Antivirus folder.

Whoa.   How do you delete millions of files on an NTFS partition?  There is no shortcut - the only quick way is to move the other files off and format the partition.  The fastest is to run rmdir /s /q on the folder.  I expect this to take several days.

Note that the files seem to have been collecting since August 2013.

C:\ProgramData\Symantec\Symantec Endpoint Protection>rmdir /s /q xfer