Weird folders keep appearing

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This may not be the right place to post this …. but
I just got an SSD so I reinstalled Win7 Home Premium x64. Everything works great except, I am now finding 3 new folders on each of my active HDD’s (a 240 GB Samsung and a 2 Tb WD) . The folders are named “barcode”, “DownloadFolder”, and “Lang”. All 3 folders are empty. I have deleted all 3 folders several times from each HDD and they just reappear.
Short of wiping the whole mess and reinstalling everything one item at a time, I’ve done everything I can think of to ID what program installs these folders. So far … No $#@% Luck. I’ve also run 3 or 4 AV progs and malware cleaners just to be sure and have gotten zero hits from each of them.
So, in a last attempt to maintain a faint semblance of sanity …. Anyone have any idea of what Program might install/use these 3 folders ??? Please

Thanks
Chinook1544

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Mark them to be “Read Only” and see if you get complaints from any of your apps.
Else, so long as they are empty, ignore them.

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Hi chinook1544

Assuming this is not an infection, then it’s most likely caused by an obscure function of some legitimate program you have installed. As one of the recurring folders is named ‘Barcode’ this gives us a clue that you should be looking for some program that can handle barcodes,

The obvious culprits would be Printer/Scanner software, PDF, Scan to PDF and OCR software, which these days often have plugins to scan and read barcodes. OmniPage OCR and the like often come bundled with printer software and usually have barcode scanning features. Logically, such a Barcode folder would have been created to store the product of the scans and probably has something, either in a temporary folder or in the Windows Registry, to re-write the folder on re-boot.

If such software rings any bells you should be able to turn the options off or even uninstall the whole program completely.

If you’re happy searching in the Registry (if you’re not, don’t do it) then you could Run:
Regedit > Edit > Find > F3 and search for text containing ‘Barcode’
(– having just done exactly that, the only reference in my Registry to ‘Barcode’ are in Registry keys relating to my FineReader OCR!)

If that doesn’t work and you’re really sure you want to knobble these unwanted folders then you could use KillBox to kill the folder (wait for the Save Box):
http://www.softpedia.com/dyn-postdownload.php/35e68aeb127f7fd2a5458f9bb78dae5e/53a44cce/6ab3/4/1

KillBox is really useful, particularly for killing those persistent maleware files and folders that keep coming back after being found and deleted by a maleware scanner. But be really careful with KillBox – it does exactly what it says on the tin so make sure the path you have browsed to is exactly to whatever file or folder you want to kill. The current version of KillBox does make a backup but I wouldn’t rely on that if I were you – it may or may not resurrect the killed file.

Good luck, Chris

P.S. One other thing to consider is that Microsoft programs and updates are well known to plonk files and folders all over the roots of your drives. I do not know of any Microsoft barcode reading programs but there may well be.

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Chris, RussB Thanks for the info
Chris: Tried your regedit search suggestion … No Joy/Nada/nothing/zip/no cigar ….Didn’t find anything. I can and did delete these 3 puppies ….. it’s just that they keep resurrecting themselves. Already tried Killbox and even it didn’t seem to kill them for good. @#$% folders remind me of the Energizer Bunny commercial:rolleyes:

RussB: As soon as they reappear again, I’ll try your suggestion of marking them as “Read Only” (that should be any moment now).

Again, thank y’all for the suggestions.
Chinook 1544

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Is it possible that you are a member of a cloud network, and those three folders are part of the cloud network? If so, then that may explain why they keep reappearing.

The reason I would doubt this explanation is that, when you delete them, they should disappear from the entire cloud neighborhood, not just from your PC.

Unless maybe you don’t have sufficient rights to delete them from the cloud network, so they keep coming back, because they are still in the network.

Group "L" (Linux Mint)
with Windows 10 running in a remote session on my file server

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mrjimphelps;
Nope, I’m not in/on any network, neither ‘cloud’ nor hardwired nor ???.

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This may not be the right place to post this …. but
I just got an SSD so I reinstalled Win7 Home Premium x64. Everything works great except, I am now finding 3 new folders on each of my active HDD’s (a 240 GB Samsung and a 2 Tb WD) . The folders are named “barcode”, “DownloadFolder”, and “Lang”. All 3 folders are empty. I have deleted all 3 folders several times from each HDD and they just reappear.
Short of wiping the whole mess and reinstalling everything one item at a time, I’ve done everything I can think of to ID what program installs these folders. So far … No $#@% Luck. I’ve also run 3 or 4 AV progs and malware cleaners just to be sure and have gotten zero hits from each of them.
So, in a last attempt to maintain a faint semblance of sanity …. Anyone have any idea of what Program might install/use these 3 folders ??? Please

Thanks
Chinook1544

I too am having this problem after migrating to an SSD. I used “Easus TODO backup portable” from some random site, since the full version would not install to WinPE. I am starting to think the portable version injected some windows executables with malicious code: these folders are appearing on every drive I connect to my computer If I delete them, they “respawn” randomly…
Windows is not showing any suspicious tasks scheduled, nor any weird services installed. All my start up programs are fine too.
I’m not completely sure, however, that the SSD migration had anything to do with the process. This problem started happening recently, but I migrated quite a while ago.
If anyone knows of any program which can monitor folder creation and log the corresponding process, please reply!

Ow, I also have to add that the “owner” of the folder is me :confused:

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Procmon or Filemon from SysInternals will monitor the folder creation and log the corresponding process.

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riffraff
Thanks for the suggestion.
Will DL them tonight and let you know if they can ID these puppies

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This is caused by the current version of Foxit.

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Yinfu seems to be right: Bug Why Foxit Reader creates these folders in the root directory

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Apologies that it took me a while to check back with this thread BUT …. YinFu nailed it :D:
Replaced Foxit Reader with Sumatra and my Weird Folder problem just disappeared.
Really couldn’t be happier.
Thank you YinFu

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