windows user profile, prf***.tmp sprouting all over

[SPants]

My incomplete and complete torrent folders now contain various quantities of prf***.tmp files. Not knowing what they were when this started a few weeks ago, I thought this was something new that utorrent was supposed to be doing, say while putting together files, or something, but clearly not so. I first noticed this in utorrent.

I think it started around the time I was trying to correct another (and probably-related) problem, when I found my shutdowns/startups were taking 10 minutes or longer (hanging on "saving your settings"/"loading your personal settings"). In hindsight I guess that might have been an effect, and not a cause of the real problem.

Then the other day I found a "prf" compressed folder sitting in one of my Thunderbird local folders. Google told me those are windows user profiles. Today when my user profile wouldn't load on reboot, I looked at the profiles on my laptop and found that somehow mine - a roaming profile set up by my company's IT people - has swollen to over 2GB.

I figured my quickest fix would be to "system restore" to some time in December-ish...and found that for some absurd reason, my system-restore "calendar" won't go back before 7 Jan, well after the prf problem cropped up.

Has this something to do with utorrent? Or another generic time-wasting windows annoyance? Can I edit or look at my profile to see what is polluting it? Or do I have to trash it and start over?

ps: just read enough to get bored about user profiles (not much) and wonder why I'm even set up with a roaming profile, which apparently could be the root of the problem...I don't use other than this laptop for work, and don't connect to anything other than a small local file-server for document access only.

Mahalo,

Dave

[Firon]

µTorrent won't do this, no.

[jewelisheaven]

prefetch files? ... Checking Process Explorer, and double clicking on a process, and going to "Environment Variables" .. check to see where your Temp and Tmp folders are set... if for some reason it is set as your download folder then that explains it. I don't know what program would do that.