Thank you, DavidR, for your response.
I should note that this is a friend's machine and I don't know the specific time it is being actively used. There is a scheduled daily full scan but the files' time-stamps indicate they are not created during that process.
There is generally a single group of files each day created at close intervals over a half to two hour span. I see no pattern as to when that time occurs. A group may contain relatively few or more than 200 files. I will delete most of these but am troubled that you and others have stated the files are perhaps created because of a problems with Avast. What problems and what actions sould I take about them?
Avast does not display unusual messages or behavior nor are the problems we ARE having on this machine directly attributable to Avast.
In fact, the ONLY problem is a slow-down of anything/everything (from the user's perspective). This is probably caused by Windows XP's drivers reverting to a slow PIO mode rather than the normal faster DMA5 mode for disk access. This has happened off and on for several weeks, now, with new drives, new main board, completely different machine, and fresh installs of WindowsXP and limited "benign" app's. Things may be fine for days or weeks and then slow down again for no discernable reason. The only hard clue is the (usual) change to PIO disk access. We had hoped the upgrade to paid version of Avast might detect a virus or rootkit the free version missed.
