What's with all the *.dcm files?

Factual Questions
1

I just now discovered that I have a great many files on my Windows XP Pro / SP3 system with the extension “.dcm” They’re always add-ons to another extension, such as “.txt.dcm" and ".htm.dcm”

What the hell’s going on? I’ve never noticed this before. The creation and accessed dates are recent (Jan 4, 2009), but the modified dates are old.

I Googled it but found nothing applicable. All I found were notes like this: File Extension .DCM details, but nothing there fits my situation.

Since I think I performed a backup on January 4, I thought briefly that it had something to do with my backup system, Acronis True Image v11. But there’s no reference to that file type on the Acronis web site. I’m stumped!

WTF?

ETA: It looks like these are all “hidden” files, too.

2

The site I linked to also notes that .dcm can be associated with Outlook Express mailboxes. However, I do not and never have used Outlook Express.

3

Does this help at all?

See if you can right-click a .dcm file and open it in Notepad. If it looks like a XML file, it could be what they say on that forum–some sort of file for backups, to make sure that different versions of the file are the same.

4

Have you installed WD Anywhere Backup from a Western Digital external drive?

5

Yes. The contents are structured as an XML file. Here’s the contents from one of them:

And, in reply to yoyodyne, I do have an external WD Worldbook, and thus I must have once used the WD Anywhere Backup tool back in 2007 briefly.

What probably happened is that I copied these files from a folder that had once been stored on the external WD Worldbook drive to my local documents folder on January 4, 2009. I’m just going to delete them all.

Thanks for the fine detective work, mhendo and yoyodyne!