Plenty of complex software solutions being offered… how about a simple hardware one? Store the files on a rewritable CD, and take it with you when you leave.
Whack-a-Mole
Once again microsoft has let me down. I use it to secure tech drawings, so I have never thought about the reading of the final nmaes as being a problem.
Doh!!!
I use to use WinZip and when you password protected it, you could not see inside. WTG Microsoft.
On that note you could get WinZip, I’m reasonable sure it is still free.
This might not actually be enough. A couple of years ago at a conference, a prominent physicist (whom I won’t name, though he probably wouldn’t mind if I did) was giving a presentation via projection from his laptop (a very common way to give presentations). He plugged it in to the projector, openend it up, and right there in the front of the room, projected in larger-than-life-size glory, was an open Netscape window he had apparently forgotten to close after his last use of the computer. Which contained, of course, porn. His reaction was just a subdued “Oh, my.”, whereupon he closed the browser window and continued with his scheduled talk.
And Anaamika, organized is when you start writing databases and search tools to call up specific desired combinations of physical characteristics, acts, publishers, and medium. Just using subdirectories leads to questions of which hierarchy to use for organizing material.
In fact, this is the solution I would have offered. My son-in-law happens to be an expert computer guy. Even found some long-lost and deleted e-mails in someone’s computer at his work (part of his job). He’s visiting this weekend. The best thing I can do is just put my faves on a disks and hide the disks. I know that if he looks hard enough, he can find it all, but I’m trusting (read: hoping) that he’ll just not be that interested in snooping.
Of course, if he snoops in the rest of the room and finds the disks…
oh, well. So he has a kinky father-in-law. Don’t make me a bad guy.
xo, C.
You must have a much smaller porn collection than I do.
I keep mine in a folder called “My Porn”. 
The ZIP file format has always allowed viewing of file names in a password-protected archive. This is left over from the days when it was PKZIP, named after its invntor, Phil Katz (who was about my age and drank himself to death five years ago). AFAIK, this has nothing to do with Microsoft.
For encryption of files, I use the free program E4M. This puts a file on your disk, up to 2 GB, which, when you want to open it up, you mount it as a file system, so it looks like a virtual disk drive and is very fast. I use it on my work computer to safely keep some files that I don’t want our IT folks to have access to. When you’re finished using it, you simply unmount it. You can find E4M by googling.
E4M works great on Win2K, but has a bug on XP - you can’t unmount the volume except by rebooting the computer. But it’s still so useful and free that I use it.
Compressed files still come up when someone does a search for video files. Hidden files come up when someone does a search for hidden video files, which is a lot longer so I will just hide my porn that way from now on.
I would still like to know if there is a way for my porn files not to come up when someone does a search.
You must have a much smaller porn collection than I do. 
A point and a question.
Point: Renaming things and sticking it into your Windows/System folder may be a great way to hide things from the casual observer, but they can be overwritten or deleted when you upgrade your system. I have lost porn that way.
Question: How good is Google Desktop at finding hidden porn?
What about Macintosh OS X?
I keep my banking records on a disk-image file that requires a password. The file itself isn’t scrambled (though there is a function to automatically encrypt and decrypt on the fly the entire home folder). But even if my bank records were encrypted, decrypted for use then encrypted again, wouldn’t the decrypted stuff still be on the disk or partition, albeit without an address, and accessible to anyone set on finding it? Wouldn’t I have to spend hours each time to obliterate the unused portion of the entire partition to make it more difficult to find the account numbers of my hidden billions stashed in the Bahamas?
And how does virtual memory work? There’s no controlling it in OS X, so even if I opened my bank records on a RAM disk, isn’t there the likelihood of the computer paging it out to disk, thereby making any encryption and use of a RAM disk moot?
There is a program called Truecrypt that performs the same function, also for free, without that annoying bug. I’ve been using it for a few weeks now for work documents (really!), and it works great.
It’s the perfect solution for hiding anything on your computer. It will also let you create volumes greater than 2GB. I believe it’s based on E4M, actually.
Mac OS X can encrypt its virtual memory file. System Preferences->Personal->Security->Encrypt Virtual Memory.
No, it wouldn’t, unless your banking software explicitly caches it to disk somewhere, which would be exceedingly stupid.
Virtual-disk-based encryption software performs all the encyption/decryption on-the-fly, as data is being read or written. It doesn’t decrypt the entire file, stick it on a disk somewhere, and then let you read it from there. All reading and writing is done directly to the encrypted file. Mac OS X’s encrypted disk images fall in this category, as does the program I mentioned above (Truecrypt).
Other encryption software does have that program. If you have to unpack your encrypted zip file every time you want to access the contents, it will leave your secret data littered around the hard drive.
Truecrypt really is the perfect solution for any problem mentioned in this thread. You can even use it to encrypt entire partitions and/or removable devices.
Other encryption software does have that problem.
If you hide the files in a virtual encrypted disk (using Truecrypt), they will not appear when searched for unless the disk is mounted.
In OSX, one can set files on one account to be unreadable (and, in fact, unlistable) on another account. An administrator can read files on other accounts, but it would take a lot of effort (i.e., not possible unless you’re specifically trying to), and I think it would be detectable that they had done it (the only way I know of would be for the admin to reset the other account’s password and then log in on that account, but that would probably not enable them to set it back).
Absolute, many thanks.
Another vote for TrueCrypt here.
Though I use it on top of other methods for the… personal stuff.
Chronos, this thing boots into OS 9, too, which negates many of OS X’s restrictions, including locking out users and duping files. So encryption likely remains the best solution.
If you’re on Linux, or willing to switch, you could use StegFS as your filesystem. This lets you have different levels of security, allowing you to let someone find a bit of innocuous porn without ever revealing the true depravity of your total stash, or even that such a stash existed (although, arguably, merely running StegFS implies that you’ve got something to hide).