What is a TMP file?

[Dauntasa]

Over 7000 of these things just appeared in My Documents and it took me half an hour to delete them all. What are they? What do they do? What made them? How do I stop them from coming back?

EDIT: Just found another 7000 in my C drive.

[Sarge51]

TMP files should be Temporary Files. Correct me if I am wrong. But as to why they'd be appearing in "My Documents" stumps me. I am not sure if deleting them was the right way to go. But if you don't seem to have any problems after that, then I guess it's fine.

My 2 Cents.

[Hunnter]

Woah, 7000...
Did you run any programs recently?
Did a program end suddenly? (crash, terminated?)

TMP files are usually just temporary files used by programs.

This could potentially be a virus as well, especially with the high number.
What were the names like?

[Dauntasa]

All of the files were called "pos(combination of letters and numbers)". I have a program that crashes over and over again. It's called Windows Explorer. It's the program that makes your computer do stuff. It shuts off whenever I open something, then comes back on a couple of seconds later.

[Beefynick]

It sounds a lot like a spyware or virus problem. Explorer usually saves tmp files right to the hard drive or even in the system folder. I would run a spyware scanning program and a virus scan and see what you come up with.

[Dauntasa]

I've run two anti-virus scans from two different programs and they didn't find anything. Also, it turns out that there were 9500 in my C drive.

[Mr. Crow]

I think this guy (http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20080207141328AAcpmNc) has a similar problem to yours. Hopefully, that will help.

[Hunnter]

Ooer, that sounds rather nasty.
What scanners did you use out of interest?

How old is your current OS install?
It could be explorer is slightly corrupted, or the shell.

edit:
Oh wait, nevermind, looks like Crow may have just found the problem.

[Dauntasa]

Fixed it. Apparently they were created by a particulary nasty virus. I had to get a special program called VundoFix to get rid of it, but it's gone now.