A couple of days ago I tried an admittedly fairly ambitious overnight free space bleach across my hard drives, which are divided into four nominal drive partitions (C:\ thru F:\), in total about 300 Gb., average utilization 60%.
When I came back to the computer (PC, Windows XP Home, SP3) the next morning Norton Utilities was no longer running. A check of the "System Health" status showed C listed against "Bleach Free Space".
Later that day, however, the system indicated that it was nearly out of space on drive C:\, which is usually kept at just over 50% utilization. On checking I found that the drive space had been filled with upwards of 240 files occupying 23.8 Gb, the names of which all started with the letters "pgbleach" (the remainder of each name was in the form ".n", ".nn", or "n.n--n", where n--n was a number string ranging in length from 1 to over 150 numeric digits).
I am assuming from the circumstances and the names allocated to the files that they were a byproduct of the "bleach free space" process. If this is the case:
1. Why would the files have been left cluttering up my C: drive?
I have run free space bleaches before without anything similar occurring.
2. What should I do to avoid a recurrence?
Do I need to limit bleaching to one drive at a time?
3. If it does happen again, what is the correct way to recover the disk space?
In this case I simply moved the files concerned to another drive so that they would still be available in case they proved vital. Nothing bad seems to have happened as a result, but I would like an assurance that it would be safe to delete them.