Any ideas on this?????????????

[Robotron Hero]

I had a file on my hard drive (a collection of png files (no, not pornography)) that suddenly grew from 45 megs to 1.2 gigs. Also, on the properties tab it said it was last accessed in 2020! Of course my first thought was a virus, as I had just found 2 Trojans on my system and eliminated them. Funny thing was, I scanned the file in question 7 or 8 times and it was totally clean!!! I deleted it and restored from a backup, but I am still wondering about this. Could it just be a Windows bug or something??? Any ideas, anyone???

[mjc]

Alot of trojans attach themselves to graphics files, some duplicate files in an attempt to fillup the hard drive. Also changing the resolution of a file will change its size. A bad shutdown can corrupt files (do things like change size, date, or other strangeness) besides outright destruction of the file. That is why you should run scandisk at least once a week and after every bad shutdown, defrag often, too. Count yourself lucky that you had a backup of it and don't try too hard to figure it out, the reasons above are just some of the possible causes, I'm sure that some others can come up with more....

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mjc
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468th Rule of Aquistion: Debugging of software is foolish, there is much profit in updates and upgrades.

[Paleo Pete]

I would not rule out a virus, try a few different antivirus utilities, no one program can find every virus out there every time. Freeware Home (http://http:www.freewarehome.org) has links to some good one available on the net, scroll down on the left to System Utils and go to Security. Trend Micro (http://housecall.antivirus.com/housecall/start_pcc.asp) might be a good place to look too.

Chances are it's not a virus, it may be something like what mjc suggested, it wouldn't surprise me at all.

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