Why are video clips that I "open" instead of "save" suddenly being stored in My Docs?

Factual Questions
1

Title pretty much says it all. I almost never click Save when opening a file from the internet, not even when downloading a program I’m about to install, etc. because I don’t like to clutter up my disk with junk I’m never going to use again.

Recently, however, all the video clips I open are being copied and saved to my My Documents folder. Anyone know why, and how I can remedy it? It’s a pain to keep going in there and deleting them.

2

Anyone want to take a shot?

3

My work comp exhibits this same strange behaviour. Haven’t had time to figure out why. I’ll let you know if I figure it out.

What OS are you on ?

4

Thanks.

Currently on WinXP Home.

5

Are the video files originating from a specific site, or are the videos from different sites?

6

They’re coming from all different sites.

7

Your temp folder is pointing to My Documents? Do other random files appear there as well?

8

I have found the same thing with WinXP Home. I was trying to find a JPEG picture that I thought I had saved but wasn’t sure where, so I did a search for *.jpg on all of the C: drive. To my surprise, there were a boatload of .jpg files in Documents and Settings / <username> / Local Settings / Temporary Internet Files and Local Settings / Temp

I found that there is a Disk Cleanup utility < Start - Run - cleanmgr > that will clean out these temporary files on WinXP. You can also clean them up by going to Internet Explorer’s Tools > Internet Options >General tab > Temporary Internet Files. However, I have not been able to find a way (other than the Disk Cleanup utility) for Firefox to clean out these files. Note too that these may be considered “hidden” folders - you may need to adjust your “My Computer” settings in order to see the “Local Settings” folder.

9

Initially I thought maybe it had something to do with a missing TEMP environment variable, but today I checked, and my TEMP and TMP variables are both correctly set.

It’s not just video files for me, it’s any file.

10

It could be that your comp is saving there temporarily, possibly because its too big just to hold in memory.

11

I just noticed that it is any file for me, too. This is weird.