Microsoft Madness, Part I

I was bored last night and decided to poke around my laptop a bit. I'd heard at least a hundred times from a zillion different sources that Microsoft loves to hide your personal data - even from you - on your computer. While I never doubted it, I never really had the time or motivation to investigate it.

Until now.

I'm sure pretty much everyone who reads this has, at some time or another, clicked on Tools in their Internet Explorer, gone to Internet Options, and selected both Clear History and Delete Files (not forgetting to check Delete all offline content as well - in order to be totally safe). Do yourself a favor. Stop wasting your time. It's simply Microsoft giving you a cosmetic warm fuzzy.

To prove it, go ahead and clear your IE history and delete files (including offline content). If you're having a blonde moment, re-read the previous paragraph. Ok, first, you have to tell XP to allow you to see both hidden and . . . get this . . . "superhidden" files. That's mildly funny in a perverse Big Brother sort of way. Do this:

1. On your desktop, right-click on the My Computer icon and select Explore.
2. Click on the Tools menu.
3. Select Folder Options.
4. Click on the View tab. [it's almost over]
5. Select Show hidden files and folders.
6. Un-check Hide protected operating system files.

You'll get yelled at by XP. It'll tell you the world is going to end exactly 3 seconds after you do this. Ignore it. This allows you to see the superhidden files. If you want to do this step the hard way, go to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows \CurrentVersion\Explorer\Advanced and find the ShowSuperHidden entry. Right-click on it, select Modify, set Value data equal to 1, and click OK.

7. Click on OK.

Now do this ... Open up your Windows Explorer and go to c:\Documents and Settings\[login ID]\Local Settings\Temporary Internet Files. A whole bunch of cookies, nothing else, right? Well, not quite. I only learned this the other night, but apparently Microsoft just loves to store information regarding every single site you've ever visited in a file called index.dat. It's buried in this folder, but you still can't see it. If you want to change that:

1. In your Windows Explorer window, go up one level to the Local Settings folder.
2. Right-click on the Temporary Internet Files folder and select Send To.
3. From the menu that pops up, select My Documents.
4. Now go to the My Documents folder and you'll see the Temporary Internet Files folder there. Open it up.
5. See the folder called Content.IE5? Go in that.
6. Presto . . . one index.dat. It's probably going to be pretty huge. When I first did this last night, mine was about 30 MB. You can sorta open it with Notepad, but if the file is superhuge, be prepared to sit and wait for a loooong time before it fully loads. This file contains everything you've ever done online. Someone could generate a pretty good criminal profile of you by parsing thru this file.

So now just right-click on the file and select Delete. You're all set!

Yea, right.

You probably had about as much luck as I did. Got yelled at about "the file is currently in use by some other process" yadayada yakyak? Microsoft doesn't like you messing with them.

Now one of the first things I tried was opening up Notepad and creating a short cleaning script. This is what I put in the file:

cd %homedrive%%homepath%
cd locals~1\tempor~1\Content.IE5
erase /f/q index.dat
cd %homedrive%%homepath%
rd /s/q locals~1\tempor~1
rd /s/q locals~1\temp
rd /s/q cookies
rd /s/q temp
md locals~1\temp
pause

I then saved it as clobber.cmd and placed it in the XP Startup folder so it gets executed immediately when I turn on the computer. (The Startup folder is located: c:\Documents and Settings\[login ID]\Start Menu\Programs\Startup) I was feeling pretty good about myself at this point. I rebooted my computer, watched the script execute, and it still bombed out trying to get rid of index.dat. Now in the script's defense, I've got a ton of crap on my laptop, so something was grabbing the file before I could wipe it out. I messed around in msconfig for a while trying to track down the culprit, but that quickly got old.

Time to get serious. At this point, I really couldn't care less what that file contained, I just wanted to delete it for the pure satisfaction of deleting it. This worked:

1. Reboot the computer in Safe Mode. (press & hold F8 during reboot)
2. Do the steps in the above program manually
3. Start the computer back up normally, look for index.dat, and rejoice. Finally. You'll probably still find one, but it won't have the last 5,000 months of your surfing data in it. Instead, it'll have a few moments worth of data.

I'm sure there are a ton of other hidden files buried all over the place that need to be dealt with. But for the moment, I'm relatively happy.