Calling all IT help desks!!

[Tango57]

ok this is what happened. today i was playing BF1942 for a couple of hours or so when i logged out and saw this flashing system warning that i was running out of hard disk space. i was like huh? wtf?? i have almost 9 gigs of free drive space on my local c: drive. so i checked and low and behold i had no more space left. how does 9 gigs disappear on me like that? so i was thinking i haven't installed any major programs the past few days. the only thing i installed today were the latest windows updates that just came out. so i rebooted my pc and after logging back onto windows i noticed i recovered the 9 gigs i thought had been used. but then as i'm monitoring my hard drive while my computer is at idle doing nothing, i can see my hard drive space slowly decreasing again in size over time as in a span of just a few minutes, i.e, from 9.45 gig to 9.44 to 9.43 etc. then after maybe 10 mins has gone by i'm already down to 8.42 gigs and so on as it continues to slowly decrease. it's like some ghost program that takes up entire hard drives is being installed without my permission. so i ran a full antivirus system scan using Avast antivirus. it caught one program i installed a while back as a virus and removed it. i ran Lavasoft adware and Spybot. they both found some spyware and removed it also. still no such luck. the only way to recover the space is to reboot but then it dwindles down again as long as my pc is running. any ideas as to why my hard drive space is slowly disappearing on me when i don't even touch it? please any help would be much appreciated! help me recover my hard drive space before i go nuts. TIA!

edit/update: ok i think i traced the possible culprit to a continually expanding trace log text file located in Windows>System 32>LogFiles>WMI>trace.log. this text document file is now 2.81 gigs and keeps getting larger. how do i stop this if this is the problem?



*system specs are in my sig, and running windows xp home edition service pack 1 with all the latest critical updates on a 20 gig Maxtor HDD. i have a separate Seagate 40 gig HDD for backing up.

 

[Agamar]

Hmm, try making the file read only.

 

[blizz]

This may help...

Good luck.

 

[Tango57]

thanks guys for the replies! i was able to locate a registry key for the program here: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE->System->CurrentControlSet->Control->WMI->GlobalLogger and then i set the value to 0 instead of 1. on restart it stopped logging to this trace file so it no longer expands and eats up my hard drive then i deleted it. anyone have any idea what uses this this is for and why it gets so large in such a short time? thanks!

 

[Slikkster]

Sounds like you used the bootvis utility and set it to trace at one time.

Out of control Bootvis tracing

Looks like Blizz already pointed you to this link. Did you read it when he posted it?

 

[Zepper]

It tracks every node that is used in your on-line sessions - can be multiple for each link you click. You should be able to shut Tracing off under DUN, internet or networking options.
.bh.

 

[Tango57]

Originally posted by: Slikkster
Sounds like you used the bootvis utility and set it to trace at one time.

Out of control Bootvis tracing

Looks like Blizz already pointed you to this link. Did you read it when he posted it?

yep that's right i did use Bootvis a couple of times before. yeah i checked out the link but i had already turned the logging off within the registry. i'll go ahead and run Bootvis again to make sure it's turned off so that doesn't happen again. thanks everyone!

 

[Tango57]

Originally posted by: Zepper
It tracks every node that is used in your on-line sessions - can be multiple for each link you click. You should be able to shut Tracing off under DUN, internet or networking options.
.bh.

yeah that an insane thing to have. it made a 9 gig text document because of that!!

:Q