hard drive size shrinking?!!?

[bgwatcher]

Ok. This is my first post here. I am finding more and more strange occurrences with my computer. I found this board by typing in my problem on google. I am running windows 98. Started by having a problem with solitaire crashing, so I was trying to do a scan disk. That was find 4 days ago and scanned and defragged successfully.

Yesterday, the printer wouldn;t work at all, so I uninstalled it and reinstalled it. It is a HP 940c. All worked fine after that. Today, I tried a scan disk again and it began to restart over and over. So I shut down everything with alt-ctrl-del (excpet for Systray and Explorer) and still had the problem. When I was checking the properties of my C: drive I noticed that the size was a total of 17 gig (7 used, 12 free.) I thought I had close to 40.

I also noticed a few days ago, that the pie showing the pink and blue was totally pink, and I thought that was weird, too. Something about compressing my hard drive, which I haven't done (to my knowledge, anyway) I don't know much about that so I ignored it for the time.

Any ideas of why the hard drive is smaller? or why I can't scan disk tonight? By the way, I just ran SpyBot and there was no new spyware. Thanks in advance for the advice.

[jmichna]

Do you run an AV program? Keep the virus defs up to date? Sounds like you might have a trojan... maybe someone is using your PC for file sharing, unbeknownst to you?

Try Trend Micro's or Symantec's on-line virus scan and see if you are infected. Also, although Spy-Bot is very good, I run both Spy-Boy and Ad-Aware... they compliment each other, what one misses, the other tends to pick up. Again, make sure you have the latest defs from Spy-Bot and/or Ad-Aware.

[HeadBand]

what is the size of your hard drive showing up as in your bios