Weird problem with my main home pc.

Its having a problem with disk space being consumed by something, space is being used at a rate of around 200MB per hour. Its going somewhere but I dont know where.

If I reboot the machine, all my free space is back again. There is little disk activity, and the general performance of the pc is unaffected. No strange processes in task manager either, I have run MS antispyware,spybot and adaware and these all find nothing. Doing a search for large files finds nothing, I guess the file is open so its reporting 0 bytes.

I left the pc on from Friday night, and during Tuesday night it ran out of disk space having munched through nearly 20GB of free space.

My work PC and my HTPC dont have this problem, the HTPC hasnt been rebooted for a month or so now and the space remains static.

Any ideas folks.

edit. to add, using treesize pro and properties on C: there is currently more than a 2GB discrepancy in free space. Treesize adds up the total size of files, whereas the properties only looks at freespace.

Could it be your page file? Might be worth checking what it's set to. Right click My computer -> Properties. Advanced tab, Performance, Then click on the change button. (hope its in the same place as 2000). Check the initial and maximum size. If its set to let windows manage it then Change it and limit it using the above. It sounds like something that your page file would do especially as it's emptying when rebooting.

If your page file is ok it could be a rogue service running. Bring up task manager and have a look through the running processes, a lot of the time it's easy to spot things that might be causing this. Just list by cpu usage and see if anything is utlilising the cpu.

I rebooted it just before leaving home this morning, and I'll see how much has gone before I get home.

Paging file is limited to a max size of 1.5GB which is its allocated size. I had an issue a while back with one of the system folders whos name escapes me at the moment, which had an ever increasing in size file in it but its not that this time.

I may wipe the PC and reinstall to see if that helps as the current install was done about 2 years ago.

It could also be system restore. It could be nicking all the space.

Success, I found the problem.

I spent ages searching the C: drive this evening, and found the culprit. The file was situated in c:\windows\system32\logfiles\wmi and called trace.log . I could literally watch it growing by pressing refresh.

Some googling later I found the solution, the logging was being caused by a MS app called Bootvis that I had been playing with to try and speedup startup, it seems that after its done its stuff it leaves logging enabled. The fix involves loading bootvis and turning the traceing off. I could then delete the file as it was now no longer open.

That was my next guess. Googled it this morning too, but didnt occur to me you would have been using boot vis