A W98 Essential

[jds]

Also, if something in there [in \Temp\] is currently open, you get an "access denied" error when you try to delete it.

ZoneAlarm v5.5, until I got rid of it, used to place and leave temporary files there. The most current file was then still in use, and I got a msg "Access denied" when trying to delete all Zone Alarm tmp files at the same time, a little nuisance. No idea how cleantmp.exe reacts when it encounteres a file "Access denied".

Hey, I was trying to remember why I chose 'xdel' from DR-DOS for my batch file instead of say, 'deltree' from W9X/MS-DOS, and maybe that was it. Maybe 'deltree' stops at the first such problem, whereas 'xdel' keeps going onto the next file.

Joe.

[snuz2]

cleantmp reads the temp directory from the TMP environment variable. This could have different values at different parts of the boot process, so it depends on if you have autoexec, config.sys or not and whether you run cleantmp from DOS ( autoexec) or Windows. There is no problem with programs that use temp to stash data as long they update it because it will not be more than a day old if you start your machine every day. Waiting more than a day or two could be a problem however, as they will be cleaned.

One has to wonder the wisdom of stashing data in scratchpad directory that should be considered volatile. If your program, Norton - whatever®, really depends on data from there, I would try to hack it to use a different directory if it is hard coded because that is stupid behavior. If it reads it from an environment varialble ( and remember there are 2 tmp and temp !!) I could make you a cleantmp that cleans the other one, you could then set it 's improperly used temp environment variable to something more reasonable such as it's own folder.

Typical stuff that clogs a temp folder on w98 is downloaded pdfs, videos, mp3s, flash that crashed the system, it will stay there forever as well. And these files are often very large.

[jds]

FYI,

Last night, I discovered a new place where disk space can leak. I have a directory called "%windir%\internet logs" and it was wasting almost 450M. It's used by Zone Alarm (if you have it), but all the similar reports of such problems involved a couple of the files there growing out of control. However, this was not my case, instead there were a whole bunch of *.TMP and *.ZIP files, of up to about 50M each.

Viewing the log data in Zone Alarm only showed about 20 entries, going back as far as 2 Jan 2011. So I added a margin of 2 days to this and deleted everything that was older than 31 Dec 2010. Zone Alarm didn't complain, so it didn't have these files open, and the same log entries were shown in ZA afterward, so that was OK too.

I think that at times, when Javascript and/or Flash garbage has locked my browser, and I have to use the Vulcan Nerve Pinch to terminate the session, stuff that was passing through Zone Alarm's hands must have simply been abandoned and accumulated in this directory. Perhaps it's used if/when I restart the browser and choose the "restore session" option. Maybe. In any case, this is where those mysterious Megs had disappeared!

Joe.

[submix8c]

FWIW, CCleaner has an option to "clean" additional files/folders. I have mine set to delete the contents of my TEMP folder (under XP).