Corrupt cache = major performance issues

December 10, 2004, 10:03:11 PM

I just went through an interesting fiasco with this laptop - so interesting and strange that I thought I should share it. Whenever I was running IE it would get slower and slower and finally IE would crash. Firefox would work fine. I prefer IE when visiting this messageboard because the Vbulletin features work better with IE.

Anyway, I was generally getting disgusted with the performance as the computer started slowing down in general (usually a sign of malware, but no errant processes were running). I decided to clear my cache, and that is when the problem presented itself: IE would crash every time I tried to clear the cache. I decided to go in the back door (Windows explorer) and delete the cache manually, but I could not even look at the temporary internet files folder - every time, Windows Explorer would hang for several minutes, then crash. I could right click on the folder but not left click. When I right clicked and selected "properties" the folder was a whopping 20GB in size with hundreds of thousands of files!

I fired up Firefox and did a google on "can't access temporary internet files" folder and came up with a solution: The "Index.dat" file, which not only indexes the cache but also remembers your settings such as maximum cache size, how long to keep pages in history, autocomplete, etc, was corrupted. apparently this is not uncommon and can happen when a computer is shut off without going through proper shutdown procedures (such as when the laptop battery dies, f'rinstance). I could not access or delete this file or the temp folder because it was in use.

The cure? I had to create a new user account, then give it administrator privledges, then log in to that account, then strip the original account of administrator privleges, then delete the entire temporary internet files folder for the original account, then re-enable admin privleges, then reboot the computer and log in as the original account and delete the temporary account I had just created. A nice, new temporary internet files folder was created as soon as the computer restated.

The moral? Keep an eye on your temporary internet files. This sucker was set to max out at 512MB and was taking up 20GB of space! As you can imagine those hundreds of thousands of files to sift through slowed down access times to the HDD considerably. With the problem fixed this thing works like a fresh install!

Re: Corrupt cache = major performance issues

Reply #1 – December 10, 2004, 11:31:34 PM

I'll keep that in mind. Since I have almost the same laptop.

Just checked mine it 353 mb. I guess i'm ok.