Profile Quota
I spent a long evening on Tuesday with a very dear but non-computer-literate friend, trying to fix her machine after a virus attack. She'd clicked on one of those "DHL Consignment - click here to rearrange delivery" jobs. Unknown to her, the children had turned off Zone Alarm and AVG because it got in the way of their games.
Anyway, removing the virus wasn't too hard. I had to run the XP Pro "repair/reinstall" routine to fix the damaged operating system stuff. That took an hour or so.
Then came the problem. The machine refused to shut down because her "Profile" was 94 megabytes against a system limit of 10240k. We can get round it by Ctrl-Alt-Del and killing proquota.exe before issuing the shutdown command, BUT...
It lists the files that are filling up the quota - right down to those of 1k or less. In total, they add to maybe 5 meg (after clearing out a vast deleted files folder in Firefox, an even vaster deleted files folder in File Explorer, and more antique tempfiles than I dreamed could exist). So the list shows 5 meg (ish), the limit is 10 meg (ish) and proquota thinks there are 94 meg.
I tried changing the profile limits in the Windows\Inf\ file (I forget the name) but the changes didn't "take".
Google has not heard of this problem (or I couldn't find it, anyway). Has anyone come across it, is it a sign that the virus is still lurking, or is there a damaged file somewhere that's confusing it?
She's (understandably) fed up with the whole business and suggested buying a new PC - because this one's running so slowly. I think the slowness thing is fixed (MSCONFIG and turn off the enormous list of stuff installed by the kids). My inclination - and hers - is to archive her "stuff", wipe the HD, and install Windows 7 etc. The children meanwhile all have their own laptops so don't need to use Mum's PC.