This may be a tough one for you, but perhaps not. My Anti-Virus blocker could not update its database because it said I was out of hard disk space. Sure enough, I checked with Explorer and it showed less than 1 Gb available. In shock, I transferred about 4 Gb of assorted documents to backup drive D and that allowed virus blocker to do its update. However, it made no sense to me that about 20 Gb of mass space had vanished into thin air.

So, I started uninstalling out-of-date applications and cleaned out another 0.5 Gb. Still no improvement, and that lack of space blocked the ability for Microsoft's defragger to defragment the drive. You need 15% free.

In desperation, I deleted an App directory that the Microsoft support staff had backed up and renamed when helping me eradicate a virus last month. It was a copy of my scanner's software. Windows fought the deletion because the scanner's .Exe was running in the background, and I had to use Task Manager to end it. Finally, when I was able to delete that directory (only about 15 Mb in size), suddenly Explorer showed 23 Gb free. Gasp!

How on earth did the presence of that directory destroy the free disk space allocation measure?

Needless to say I defragged after that and things seem faster and smoother as well (as expected). Please advise what happened here as best as you can.