Author Topic: Woa! Why All The DAT Files???  (Read 3230 times)

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karlmoll

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Woa! Why All The DAT Files???
« on: February 10, 2005, 01:39:27 AM »
Just installed the free version of Avast! 4.5 Build 4.5.561 yesterday and it seems every time I run a scan of my hard drives I get thousands (YES THOUSANDS) of little 1 kb .DAT files generated in a folder called;

C:\Documents and Settings\Administrator\Local Settings\Temp\_avast4_\unp188643333\0x00

An example of the file name format would be -2140838441.DAT or -2140838458.DAT. Right now I have 87,756 (YES, that's eighty seven thousand) of these little buggers. They are all sequential and take a very long time to delete. Oh, and yes, the scan never does complete. What's going on here???? HELP!!!!!

Offline Eddy

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Re: Woa! Why All The DAT Files???
« Reply #1 on: February 10, 2005, 01:41:48 AM »
unp is short for unpacked. It means that you have archives on your system that Avast unpacks to scan the content of them.

Scanning an entire drive can take a while. What tells you/makes you think it doesn't finish?

karlmoll

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Re: Woa! Why All The DAT Files???
« Reply #2 on: February 10, 2005, 03:02:51 AM »
OK - Well all that makers sense. I judged it didn't complete because it seemed to hang. Maybe I just didn't giver it enough time to finish. I think I'll let it run overnight. I'm guessing it will take hours to do my 15 Gb of data. Thanks, I'll be able to sleep better now  :)

Offline igor

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Re: Woa! Why All The DAT Files???
« Reply #3 on: February 10, 2005, 09:48:37 AM »
Any chance you have an older version of Microsoft Streets & Trips (or MS Autoroute) installed?
It contains one file in CHM format, containing over 600,000 files - so, it takes very long to process and creates an enormous amount of temporary files in between (that are not deleted if you kill the scan, instead of letting it finish).

The problem with the temporary files (and with displaying the scan progress) will be fixed in the next version of avast! (you can try the beta) - but scanning this particular file (Usaarts.its) will still take pretty long (lets say an hour, but it depends on your computer, of course) - so I suggest to put this file to the list of avast! exclusions so that it's not scanned anymore.