Sctemp Folder In C:\ Root, What on earth?

I have encountered yet another problem that is a first for me, and this time, just wow.

On a XP machine, one of my friends complained about how he can't figure out where on earth all his HD space went. His HDD is approximately 140 gigs.

I laughed at first, thinking it was a small disk to begin with, but decided to investigate, thinking it was just something normal taken up by picts/games/music/pron/spyware/whatever.

Well, he has no games on said computer. Actually, I found nothing significant other than 15 gigs of itunes music and 18 gigs of pictures. Looked up how much Windows itself was taking up, only ~5 gigs. To say the least, I was surprised how well kept his computer was.

So I run a thorough scan of his comp for anything and everything over 5 megabytes. Figure there would be redundant copies of music/picts.

And then I find a folder (C:\sctemp) which is full of 100 megabyte files of an extension I have never heard of before, and none are associated with a program.
(Filename example: CF~S0000.T~P )

The folder itself is taking up 97 gigs, which immediatly raised so many red flags in my mind. However any and all searches for that extension and folder on google and wikipedia turned up nothing that was even remotely relevant, except possibly this: http://www.secondcopy.com/kb/article.aspx?id=12630
However, that is not the same extension, and I dont think thats what im dealing with, unless there is something im missing here.

Anyone have an idea what this folder is? I figure deleting the folder is my best option, but id rather not till I can confirm that these are not critical system files or are somehow attached to such.

Any help or clarifications would be a godsend.

It looks like a temporary folder...I don't know why the hell it's 97 gigs though. Do you have a normal C:\Temp folder?

Have you run a virus scan?

This post has been edited by Flooding Mercury on Nov 2 2009, 02:29 PM

He has a virus scanner that auto runs daily on full scan.
Went ahead and did ad-aware scan and defrag for shits and giggles.

There is a temp folder in root of C, but its takes up less than a megabyte.

Delete it and see what happens?

Backup whatever files he wants to keep first.

Check the file's last modified date. If they haven't been modified or accessed for a long time, it's usually safe to delete them.

Also see if the files are created at predictable intervals.

Bingo.