Excessive disk space use by VirusDefs temporary files

[Dick Ballard]

A lot of disk space is being consumed on my Windows XP partition by
Norton Internet Security 2007 when old virus definition temporary
files were not deleted after a recent automatic live update.

I went looking for the massive file usage and found that NIS left many
hundreds of megabytes of trash in the Windows\Temp
directory under folders named slu****.tmp. These are temporary anti
virus definition file updates for just one date (11/21/07 - 43MB each)
repeated in 27 of the 118 slu folders for a total of 1.161 GB (yes,
that's 1161 MB!).

I have deleted all of those files and have thus reclaimed a lot of
disk space. But there is still another accumulation of tmp folders and
data in C:\Program Files\Common Files\Symantec Shared\VirusDefs\.

Many directories exist here:

\20071121.002\
\20071124.003\
\20071125.006\
\BinHub\
\incoming\
\TextHub\
\tmp1a51.tmp\
\tmp1a93.tmp\
\tmp1b02.tmp\
...
and many more of these:
\tmp****.tmp\
etc

Of the 100 or so \tmp****.tmp\ folders, 20 of them each contain 43MB
of the same files that I found in windows\temp folder, all with dates
in the last few days. The same series of files also appears in each of
the dated folders and the \BinHub\ folder.

According to the following Symantec link, all of the tmp folders
should not be there:

http://service1.symantec.com/support/ent-security.nsf/854fa02b4f5013678825731a007d06af/94d487eb642c071b882571270003d12f?OpenDocument

or

http://tinyurl.com/2xezv4

However I find that I cannot delete these folders even if I clear the
Read Only flag. How is NIS protecting these folders and how do I clean
out the mess?

Dick Ballard
ball...@att.net

[Dick Ballard]

OK, found out how to delete the tmp folders:

On the NIS screen go to "Internet Security and Firewall Options".
Under "Protect my product" uncheck "Turn on protection for my Symantec
product".

Now navigate to the tmp****.tmp folders and delete them.

Don't forget to empty the recycle bin afterwards. Also remember to
turn "Protect my product" back on when you finish.

Dick Ballard
ball...@att.net

On Mon, 26 Nov 2007 08:55:14 GMT, Dick Ballard <ball...@att.net>
wrote:

[Turner Morgan]

Thanks for the information.

If you mark the files and then press "Shift+Delete" you won't have to empty
the Recycle Bin. "Shift+Delete" tells Windows to just delete the files
without putting them into the Recycle Bin. If you use this trick for other
files, just be sure you want to delete them because they'll be gone. You
could get them back if you have some kind of data recovery app but that has
to be run before you save anything to the disk or the space made available
from the deleted file(s) might get overwritten.

Regards,

Turner

"Dick Ballard" <ball...@att.net> wrote in message
news:d06lk35smt3pcc1nq...@4ax.com...

[sulliva...@gmail.com]

> http://service1.symantec.com/support/ent-security.nsf/854fa02b4f50136...

>
> or
>
> http://tinyurl.com/2xezv4
>
> However I find that I cannot delete these folders even if I clear the
> Read Only flag. How is NIS protecting these folders and how do I clean
> out the mess?
>
> Dick Ballard

> balla...@att.net

Great article, Dick. Thanks.