Sunday, December 04, 2005

8GB temp file for MSN Messenger

The other day I was defragmenting my disk and had a look at the most fragmented files on there in case I could delete them or offload them to an external disk (it speeds up the process a lot).

I noticed that right at the top of the list was a file called
C:\Documents and Settings\Scott\Local Settings\Application Data\Microsoft\MSN Messenger\00037ffe8709ca1c\SharingMetadata\Working\SimilarityTable_2
and that it had about 500 fragments, and was 8.00GB in size. :|

Picture of the file appearing in Windows Explorer.

Right-clicking on the image's properties, however, reveals that the file doesn't actually take up that much room on disk..

Picture of the file's 'size on disk' readout in Windows Explorer.

Naturally, the first thing I did was Google the files which turned up a whole bunch of dead links, as well as this Portugese forum (Google translation) and this unhelpful English forum.

Unless its giving you problems or you're runing out of HDD space-- I wouldnt worry about it. Especially since you don't really know what it's for yet.
Great. Anyway, translation of the Portugese page led me to this thread on Neowin which clarified the issue somewhat. Apparently I'm not alone in this.

Looks like the file came from the Windows Messenger Live beta. I'd advise anyone who installed it to look for this file and delete it. It's a hidden and system file, so you might have to turn a few options off in Folder Options.

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