[jambutty]

It took a while but a search has not revealed any massive files apart from pagefile.sys at 1,474,560KB.

CrazyBrowser, which is an IE clone and uses many of the IE files, was not affected and as Firefox isn’t affected the chances are that Opera won’t be either. So there is no point in trying it.

Yesterday morning I decided to give IE7 another chance and installed it. So far so good but it is early days yet.

However, as it appears to cure the problem it doesn’t tell me what it was and I’m curious. After all someone else could have the same problem and if I knew what it was I could tell them.

Using IE7 doesn’t answer the question of why my OS partition has suddenly got filled up and what with.

I can’t help feeling that someone somewhere has come up with a way of hijacking IE6 browsers so that it can be used to launch SPAM or DdoS attacks without the computer owner being aware of what is happening until he notices a very, very slow computer. I have read a number of threads on other forums where some people are seeking a solution to a slow computer.

How the browser is hijacked is open to debate but it is rather strange that only IE6 is affected, meaning that it is being targeted because it is the most popular browser.

A firewall can close all the computer ports but it has to leave the ones that the browser and email client uses open and it is these two ports that are the computer’s Internet Achilles heel.

So how’s this for a wild idea? A ‘bot’ wanders the Internet looking at every single IP address in turn. There are some 4,294,967,296 (256^4) different IP addresses so it will take time. Once the ‘bot’ finds an IP address that is in use, the ‘bot’ interrogates the computer to see if IE6 is running. If it finds one it hijacks the browser for its own use. That is why on some days I get the problem within a varying amount of time after connecting to the Internet and NEVER when not using IE6 and NEVER when I am not connected.

Thanks anyway Ian but I think that it is going to have to be a re-format and re-install and then spend hours getting all the various updates. This should restore my free space and as I will be using IE7 the slow down problem may not occur.

It would have been nice to know for sure what the cause was though.