Ted, you said somewhere (and correct me if I'm wrong or misunderstood), but you said or implied that these temp files are written by the OS in some process, and that Poser is not writing them and is unaware of them being written.

That sounds reasonable and make sense. Sort of like the OS is writting out log files of all the communication.

If that is the case, it seems to me that if these files are removed while Poser is running, Poser should proceed as normal.. it doesn't know about them, doesn't use them, doesn't care. Correct?

I've noticed two things that don't make sense with that logic though:

1. If Poser is running and I delete all the files in my temporary internet folder, Poser freezes.

2. I mentioned that I had moved my temporary internet folder initially to a small removable SD card and reserved only about 10 megs for this, with the rest of the disk being used by readyboost.

a) I noticed several things... 1. the library update access was very slow and 2 in ran out of space very quickly and when it did, the library ceased to function.

So the question is, why does removing these OS chitchat files freeze poser and why would running out of space to store these files ALSO cause poser to stop updating the library?

I've been studying the impact of all these files on a RAM disk so as not to destroy a real drive. It's not simply an issue of lots of files getting written and maybe forgetting about them or deleting them later. There's an underlying adverse affect on the drive over time.

The biggest impact I'm seeing is growth to the MFT of the RAM disk (which I reformat or it gets reset when I reboot). 

Here's a typical 1 hour session

I have a 200 meg ram drive used to store temporary internet files. All these temp files are getting written to this drive... about 3 or 4 per second.

Within about 1 hour, approx 10,000 - 15,000 are created.

The total of these files adds up to approx 3 to 6 megs but actually takes up close to 30 megs of HD space because of the way a 1k file may take up a full 4k of cluster space. 

That's not that bad part though.

The bad part which I'm seeing is the growth of the MFT. The MFT grows as best I can tell, by about 20 megs as well in this 1 hour session because it has to write out 10,000 - 20,000 entirely new entries as it appears they are entirely random sequences each poser session.

So imagine the impact on a real drive with a real MFT. It's not the temp files themselves that's the long term problem. It's this MFT growth that eventually may be crippling. As far as I understand it, the MFT never shrinks, and entries for each of these files, while they may be zeroed out if the files are deleted, are still effectively a row of zeros in a huge spreadsheet.

And it grows 10k or 20k new rows each time poser is run and kept open for about an hour.

A typical internet browser session all day may write .. I dunno... 1000 new entries. Maybe. No big deal. I don't think any OS was meant or can handle 20,000 new files added and removed each day. That's 2 million entries if you start up and run Poser for 1 hour, and do that 100 times.

THIS is the part that ... while it's not affecting ME anymore... could be seriously killing other people's machines. The temp files will eventually get deleted. The MFT will not.

Ok... what part of this did I get wrong? :)