Thousands of .IDX files in My Documents

I opened My Documents a couple weeks ago to find files beginning with CA00.IDX, and onto:

CA0B.IDX
CA0C.IDX
CA0D.IDX

and so and and so on. . .does anyone know what this is?

There are thousands of them, should I be concerned?

Do you have AOL? .IDX is an extension used by temporary mail files in AOL. Some other possibilities here.

Try opening them in Notepad (Open With…) to see if there’s any recognizable text in there - that might give you an idea what they are. Usually idx = index, but many different applications use that same file extension for different file types (Agent, Outlook Express…)

I opened about 5 files in notepad and get the following:

TIDX è

Thanks Q.E.D. - not sure though - don’t have AOL, don’t use Outlook Express, Corel, ICQ, and I’m not sure about the other items on that page. . .

A certain fragment of my brain absolutely hates seeing them there, and wants SO BADLY to delete them ALL! I stuck them in a folder anyways, so they aren’t really bothering me I guess, as long as they’re not hurting anything.

If you moved them to a folder and everything is still functioning fine, then you can safely delete them. Moving them to a subfolder effectively “hides” them from whatever appilication or process created them, so if nothing exploded, you’re good to go.