xiozhiq

Hey All, I'm curious. Recently I uninstalled World of Warcraft. I waited about 45 minutes, and when it still hadn't completed, I ended the uninstall process. After that, I just deleted all the shortcuts and files that the program/installer/updates had left scattered all across my computer. Then my mystery began. My recycle bin was empty, but I was still missing some disk space. Curious, I ran CCleaner, first in normal mode and then again with secure deletion (1 pass). Now, what intrigues me is that the normal deletion went quickly and smoothly, no error messages. Then when I ran the secure deletion pass, CCleaner hung for a while deleting WoW related big files (*.mpq's, the game data) that range from 500MB to 2.5GB each, but not from the Recycle Bin, but rather from hidden files in the C:/$Recycle.Bin/ directory. Now, I had already run the normal process, so I'm curious as to why those files still exist, and I'm curious as to why the secure deletion pass was able to detect them whereas the normal one was not. Moreover, when I unchecked all the "hide protected system files from me" options in the 'folder options' section of the control panel (running windows vista business 32bit), I was able to see and navigate to that directory, but even deleting the files there didn't prevent CCleaner from attempting to delete them the next time it ran (I didn't wait for it to finish the first time that I ran the secure wipe). Right now I'm running CCleaner in safe mode with secure deletion enabled, and I'm just going to wait for it to do its thing but I wonder... What gives? 1) What is $Recycle.Bin? 2) Why are there files that I can't see in $Recycle.Bin even though I have unchecked "don't show hidden folders" and "hide protected operating system files" that CCleaner can see and delete? I realize that this may have something to do with the way in which I interrupted the original uninstall process, causing errors, but this post is purely related to my curious nature. An additional tidbit of information that might be interesting is that when I deleted some other big files from my hard drive after this and emptied the recycle bin (50 files totaling 9GB), the recycle bin dialog that popped up was stuck at 0 bytes/sec and hung there for about 5 minutes before I got bored & restarted into safe mode to let CCleaner do its thing. If anyone has any insights or questions as to the circumstances surrounding these events, let me know -- X