Very weird recycle bin problem

For a couple of days now my recycle bin has appeared to contain trash. When I open it there is nothing in it, no hidden files, no system files, no bytes.

Heres the worrying thing, when I click empty recycle bin a confirmation box pops up asking if I want to delete "WINDOWS"? I haven't clicked yes because that doesnt seem a good idea!

Any idea what's going on? Or how to resolve this? Shall I just click yes? My windows folder still appears to exist

Would appreciate some advice. I've done a scan disk, no errors found. I've got antivirus software constantly running and updated, don't think it's a virus. I've also sent another file to the recycle bin - although it said there was one file in there, again when I clicked empty it said there were two files, so I just deleted the one.

FREDDY

Hi Freddy,
That is indeed weird behavior. I too have had similar occurences, although thankfully it didn't think the Windows folder or any folder having the same name was in the trash. Have you tried manually navigating to the recycle bins on all your rewritable drives to see which one might contain a Windows folder? On Fat file system drives the recycle bin is called (L:\)"RECYCLED" on NTFS drives the recyle-bin is called (L:\)RECYCLER. Also do any system utilities interact with your recycle bin this might be a disk utility like:

Norton Utilities
Mijenix/Ontrack SystemSuite
Acronis PCToolWorks
Et. al

You might try removing and or turning off their recyle-bin protection and see if things don't work better.

Cheers,
Christian Blackburn

I navigated to the recycle bin as you said and it still appears empty. Turning off the recycle bin does nothing.

I only have Norton Antivirus running, none of the programs mentioned and no recycle bin protection programs running.

Any suggestions? I could click empty and click yes on the confirmation box? Hoping it doesnt delete my windows folder!

FREDDY

Thanks Alec, I'll try the suggestions when I get home shortly.

FREDDY

I reduced the size of the recycle bin to 0%, for all the disks, restarted still with the same problem. How do I view the files corrupted in the recycle bin? It still looks empty when I open it with explorer.

FREDDY

I've found something on this in another forum, don't know if it's trustworthy though, any adivce?

http://www.cyberiapc.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=2837

Here's a direct link to the recycle bin fix someone suggests, could someone check it out to see if it's safe, I've had a look at it but I've no idea what any of it does!

http://www.kellys-korner-xp.com/regs_edits/restorerecyclebin.reg

I've just noticed, with the Disk Cleanup in windows. I have two hard drives, C: and D:, disk clean up says the recycle bin on drive C: is 0bytes, disk clean up for the D: drive says 6,575 KB in the recycle bin! But when I click view files....nothing in there still.

FREDDY

Sorry for the delay in this reply! Thanks very much for all your help Alec.

The most simple thing ended up clearing the problem! Very frustrating!

I simply ran a Windows "Disk Cleanup" on that disk, and that emptied the Recycle Bin and cleared the problem!

FREDDY