System restore "ghost" files...? (~1.3 Gb unusable on sys drive after XP reinstall)

OS: Windows XP Home, SP1

My system drive, which is an approx 10 Gig partition out of about 50 Gigs of hard drive, had recently become quite full - over 80%. As anything over 75% makes me uncomfortable I started looking inside for the culprit. Checked all the usual stuff- temp files, IE cache, logs, etc. to no avail-nothing significant there.

Disk properties still said roughly 7.7 Gig used and 1.9 Gig free.

Doc and Settings folder occupies 175 Mb, Program Files occupies 650 Mb, and Windows folder occupies about 1.23 Gig. System Volume Information (pagefile) is 768 Mb as min, 768 Mb as max and therefore should always be 768 Mb.

When I ran Overdisk to see what the hog was, it gave me a used space which roughly agreed with the sum of those numbers if you add the 12% allocated for system restore which does not show in Overdisk.

Doing the math, and being generous with the numbers by rounding up still leaves a substantial amount of disk space which SHOULD be free but which windows insists is not.

Exasperated, but faced with my final option, I disabled system restore and restarted. Disk used space is now at about 69% as one would expect after deleting the ~12% worth of precious restore files. This still leaves a few Gig unaccounted for.

I ran the defrag again (Vopt XP v7) and lo and behold, it reports that nearly 2 Gig of disk space is STILL occupied by system restore files. Checked windows and it says Sys Restore IS disabled.

One thing I should say also is that a few weeks ago I reinstalled XP (I won't go into the reasons for that here) by installing XP, with SP1 slipstreamed, over the top of the old installation so as not to lose any of my valuable data. The OS overwrites itself quite nicely I thought, only producing a few new profiles with suffix ID's attached to them. OS works fine otherwise.

HOW DO I DELETE THESE STUBBORN HOLDOUTS OF THE PREVIOUS OS's RESTORE FILES?!?

Thanks in advance,

stvntylr

 

Reads a bit like someone may not be watching where stuff installs.

My C: drive ( XP Pro ) is 8.3gig with 3.3gig free.

Nothing downloads to the C: drive. Everything downloads to a temp folder on the H: drive. And then put in a named folder on H: and Installed from there.

When installing stuff I watch and make sure it installs to somewhere other than C:

In other words my C: drive has very little more than what is required by the OS.

BillyBob