[captab]

Platform: Dell Dimension 8250, Windows XP SP3, AVG, one 60GB disk drive.

I have a 60GB disk partitioned into two partitions C: and D: The C: partition contains essentially the XP SP3
system and programs files, while the D: partition contains essentially user files. I have 4 user accounts set up,
which are: Administrator, User1 (with Admin priviledges), User2, User 3.
Both partitions are nearly full, with My Computer showing:
C: Used: 22.1GB Free: 3.64GB Capacity: 25.8GB
D: Used: 21.2GB Free: 8.76GB Capacity: 29.9GB
I need to get some more free space, so I strarted by looking at emptying the recycle bins. The recyclers folders show:
C:\Recycler 23.3m 23.6m 146 30 (size, size on disk, files, folders)
D:\Recycler 2.61g 2,17g 39859 7623
OK, so nothing much to gain on the C:, but 2.61GB on D: . So I looked at the contents of D:\Recycler and here
I see a problem with which I need some help with understanding what is going on there.

I have only 4 user accounts set up, but the D:\Recycler contains 7 folders named with SIDs. I run the psgetsid tool
and it tells me that they are as follows: (account name, size, size on disk, files, folders, date modified)
Administrator: 15.8MB 16.0MB 59 2 2/11/2008
User1 3.98KB 8KB 2 2 11/11/2008
User2 85B 8KB 2 0 11/11/2008
User3 85B 8KB 2 0 9/21/2008
no mapping1 1.16KB 12KB 3 0 12/6/2004
no mapping2 909MB 954MB 19198 5070 11/10/2008
no mapping 3 1.71GB 1.23GB 20593 2542 11/7/3008
Now the questions:
1) What are these "no mapping" folders that have SIDs that are not associated with current user accounts?
2) Can I delete them (in particular the recent two) without any ill effects?
3) What needs to be done to prevent XP from creating such "no mapping" folders?

I'll appreciate your answers to the above three questions.

 

[blah789]

This may not help you directly but I sometimes have similar problems because I switch between OSes and boot drives. First: all my copies of software are legal: I have 2 copies of Windows 2000 (one OEM, one full), and one of XP upgrade student. I have 3 hard drives with OSes on them, and a few more for data, but only one physical desktop PC. Moreever I partition the drives into multiple partitions (I used to dual boot and so on, but not anymore). I swap cables all the time to swap data and do testing of all kind. Naturally when I delete files into the recycle bin on one data drive without emptying it, and then I hook up another drive with a different OS, things look a bit weird. Sometimes I see everything on the recycle bin on the desktop. Sometimes I don't see anything (or only deleted files from certain partitions but not others) when I look at the recycle bin on the desktop, but I can see stuff in the recycler subfolders (or recycled folder if fat32) on the specific drive. That's not a problem though, as when I right click and pick empty recycle bin, everything is gone anyway. As I format, reformat, and reinstall OSes with different and new user accounts, each one will have a diff SID, which will be reflected in the recycler folder, and that's how I now have a whole bunch of SID folders in recycler.
When I got vista, it was different, because vista uses $recycled.bin or something like that. I'd always get a recycler folder on the vista disk when booting into xp, and a $recycled.bin folder when booting into vista. I noticed though that they can be deleted without any problem from the other OS.
You can delete the recycler folder safely - but I wouldn't try it from explorer (it would probably re-create the folder right away - or might not work because it's using itself to delete?) The way I did it was by the command-line. Go to your drive... for example x
X:
then go to the root directory
cd \
then delete the recycler folder and all subfolders
rd /s recycler
Be SURE that's what you want to do though. It's pretty much not reversible.
The object of clearing recycler would be to clear up all the SID folders. They'll be recreated next time to delete a file or folder using a given account.

Anyway it's just some anecdotes. Not sure if they'll help.

The obvious scenario to ask yourself is... did you ever create other accounts that were subsequently deleted? That's probably where the extra recycle bins come from. Also they could be created if the drive was connected to another boot drive (not necessarily on your computer - could be mounted on external drive for example). One last possibility is I noticed sometimes some of the system accounts (can't remember which ones) will create profiles (just as if they had logged or something). Don't know if they could possibly do the same for the recycle bin.