A little worried here...

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So, hello. I'm having a teeny bitsy problem with this computer here. Till last weekend, I had absolutely no problems at all. But now some small ones can be seen.
First of all, my computer is fast, at least for most of the time. But if I keep it running, say, ten hours, it becomes incredibly slow and freezes for small times. Note that I have left it running for days before without much lower performance.
Simultaneously, my firewall is reporting about these programs that want to access the internet from my computer. Now, this may very well point to a virus or somesuch.

The question itself is, all those programs wanting to connect are from CWINDOWS\temp. Does the temp mean "temporary" here? If so, can I just delete everything in that folder then?
I'm guessing it might, but NO WAY I'm going to try my luck here.
Cheers and thanks in advance.

 

I'd say you have a combination of spyware/adware/malware running in the background and slowing your system up. Have you considered going through your startup files through msconfig and seeing what you have running? Odds are there's some stuff in there that's adding processor and RAM overheads.

Also, for deleting your temp folder's files, you shouldn't have a problem deleting anything as most of the stuff stored there is your past browsing history files like cached web pages, your cookies, passwords and whatnot that you may have wanted stored.

So yeah, deleting that isn't going to have any serious consequences, just by itself. If you have some weird spyware, then however, I'm guessing its not going to be as simple as deleting the files. You might have to go in for some spyware removal software which should take care of it for you.

Cheers!

 

Thanks, I'm going to see if it helps.
And indeed, when it's slow, my processor usage (I think it's called that, can't say for sure since it's in finnish and I'm not the greatest expert in computer terms.) is 100%. But when I'm looking for the cause, it's explorer.exe that is taking all that space. Sometimes I've just pressed "cancel the process" and executed it again, and it seems to help a little. Also, rebooting helps for a while.

But now I'm going to empty the temp, and see if it does anything.

 

*sigh* Some people just don't read sticky threads...

Kitrax’s guide to killing Adware, Spyware, and Viruses
Go to the above link for a perscription to clean your computer of viruses and other malware.

Also, since you said they're all coming from your Temp folder (stuff you don't really need), you can easily create a nifty way to clear out your entire Temp folder each time windows starts...it's easy too!

Open up Notepad and tpye these two lines exactly as shown:
rd %temp% /s /q

md %temp%

Save the file to the desktop and assign it the name: cleantemp.bat

To add the batch file to your Start menu's Startup submenu, drag it onto the Start button until the menu appears, hover atop All Programs (in XP) or Programs (in 2000) until that menu appears, and then drop it onto the Startup folder.
It's that easy! Now, each time you lon on to Windows, the bat file instructs Windows to cleat out the Temp folder, which is great for removing nasty malware files...and saves space in general.

 

Actually, yeah I did, thrice to be exact. When I then bothered to look, it indeed turned out to be some wares. Some adwares, that may show adverts, which is not that terrifying to me. And some spyware that could possibly see what I was doing, again not that terrifying since I don't do anything too private or secret here.
But anyways, all that is removed and past now, properly even.