Neta1o

You are quite right, but I was leaving the DOS bit until last

If he gets XEN as I suggested, and runs the "major clean up option", it will give him the option to delete all system restore files. He should then run Winfile and delete the "temp" subfolder in _restore.

That should leave him with an empty folder.

I would still run scandisk then defrag in safe mode, just in case the FAT tables are corrupted?

The reason I say this is that Windows Explorer is reporting a 16 Gb file and his anti spyware software is scanning .cpy files that he cannot detect either in explorer or winfile. That seems a little strange?

I have checked this machine and it has a _restore file on both drives, and both of them are empty. Which is probably a good job as my total HDD space is only slightly over a half of his _Restore folder

Cheers