Windows 7 Woes - Roaming?

Greetings everyone,

I've had a little problem recently. In the folder:

C:\Users\fx\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu\Programs\Startup

It seems several thousand executables with various names using 6 digit hexidecimal notational with an appended ".exe.exe" were somehow created there(there were also some batch files, and probably other crap). Internet Explorer, I'm looking at you(as the date coincides with an accidental usage of IE; I really wish all programs would respect the default browser)! Didn't notice it for over two weeks, until I rebooted the other day. Suffice to say, several thousand processes makes a computer very, very slow. If they only put one or even a dozen, even a hundred I might have not even noticed so rapidly. Silly hackers, more is not better(over 4000)! Anyways, booted into safemode, deleted them. Problem solved. Ran Windows Update/Secunia PSI, made sure everything is up to date, and now it is. Even installed IE9 :sick:. Ran AV, and my system is apparently clean. That was almost too easy.

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So what's up with these roaming profiles? Any problems disabling the 'feature'? I don't seem to be a candidate for ever making use of 'the feature'. I just use my one computer. I don't need my profile on any other system. Is it safe to just disable/delete this now? Or is there a process to complete before disabling the roaming profiles to make sure I don't lose anything? There's over 6,000 files in there. Most of it seems like junk(like temp files, cookies, empty folders, etc.). But then there's some stuff that might seemingly be important like preferences and saved game data files for my installed PC games. Is all this roaming stuff just redundant, or will I need to copy any of it over to my local profile?

Thanks fellas.

You must have malware or something on your system (either that or your just lucky). I don't have anything in that location on my Win7 laptop but then again I hardly use Internet Explorer.

I found this explanation of what the Roaming profiles are.

Edit:

Not sure if this would help?

Many programs store data to the roaming section of your profile (some intentionally, some thru lack of knowledge), and they will get errors if it doesn't exist or is disabled - moving files to the non-roaming section of your profile will not stop that.

Even if there was a way to get rid of the roaming section it wouldn't do any good, because the same data would be stored in the non-roaming section instead.

The best thing to do is general housekeeping, such as deleting temp files etc (but be careful deleting empty folders, as that might cause errors in programs that expect them to exist).

Well, I left the roaming file structures intact. I disabled roaming profiles through the Group Policy editor, though. No problems so far. I still see a myriad of applications still using those directories, unfortunately. Definitely won't be deleting them.