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Bunch of eula and .dll files suddenly appeared on Data drive.

Skeletor
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Posted April 15, 2012 at 11:58PM

I keep my C drive for Win 7 and programs. My D drive is for data: Documents, music, photos, movies etc.

Today I noticed that a load of files have suddenly appeared there. These are eula,dll and installer files. 24 file in total. Looking at a eula file it appears to be something to do with Microsoft and states:

*You have received the software as part of the Visual Studio 9.0 Beta Program. The terms and conditions of the Visual Studio 9.0, Beta 1 license agreement applies to your use of the software.** MICROSOFT PRE-RELEASE SOFTWARE LICENSE TERMS MICROSOFT VISUAL STUDIO 9.0 PROFESSIONAL, BETA 1 These license terms are an agreement between Microsoft Corporation (or based on where you live, one of... etc*

Anyone know what this is about? I don't recall downloading anything like this, and in any case, I'm a little tidier with my downloads.

Can I just delete these files? Or is that going to cause problems?

Any info much appreciated.

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northumbria61

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Posted April 16, 2012 at 8:43AM

EULA's are most likely End-User License Agreements (those big legal blobs of text that no one reads, and you click "accept" otherwise the program won't install).

Did you find this in some program's folder? If so, that's probably the EULA for that program. If you delete it, at worst, the program might stop working.

I think more importantly is the fact that these are text documents. Even if you delete them, you're likely to free up less than a single megabyte (1 MB) of space. If you're trying to clean out hard drive space, deleting these txt documents honestly will get you nowhere.

My point is that there's no reason to delete them.

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northumbria61

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Posted April 16, 2012 at 8:48AM

And then there is the reason why you should always read them before clicking OK

Because you almost certainly gave away a ton and a half of your rights when you did it - everything from allowing the company to install any software it wanted on your computer without even bothering to tell you (yes - a lot of legitimate companies do that - and a lot of scam artists have installed malware on systems after getting the user to click a EULA OK that said it was OK to install malware - at that point there isn't much law enforcement can do about it). You may have agreed to not access your own data without their permission. You may have agreed to a lot of things you really didn't want to. You almost certainly agreed that you couldn't sue them, for anything, under any circumstances, even if they did something completely and totally illegal.

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Skeletor

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Posted April 16, 2012 at 5:28PM

Thanks northumbria61

"Did you find this in some program's folder?" No, they are loose on my D drive (Data). I say "loose", because everything on my D drive is in its relevant folder, except these pesky files.

I know what eula and dll files are, I just don't know how they got there or if they're ok to delete (my guess is that they are). I never (knowingly) download and install anything that I'm unsure of.

As they appear to be from Microsoft, my initial thought was that they may have come from a Windows Update, now I'm not so sure.

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john bunyan

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Posted April 16, 2012 at 6:15PM

I would copy them to a DVD or another drive, then delete them. If anything does not work you could retrieve them. A puzzle as to why they are on the data partition.

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lotvic

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Posted April 16, 2012 at 11:31PM

seems to be a bug with another progs installer ClickHere and scroll down to the bottom two posts

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Skeletor

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Posted April 17, 2012 at 12:05AM

Many thanks lotvic

Those are the exact files I have. So, it's a long-term bug that MS seem unable to fix (the first post in that thread was Nov 2008). Anyway, seems they're safe to delete.

Thanks again lotvic, much appreciated.

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lotvic

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Posted April 17, 2012 at 7:04PM

Thanks for letting us know, makes you wonder how many others have those files and don't know why or what to do with them :0

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