I'm examining a Windows 98 system and have found many files over 2 hard drives with the same naming convention. They don't seem to come from any specific application or location. I thought maybe they were temp files of some sort, but they don't appear in places where you would typically have temp files. For example, they were located in My Documents and user created folders. I have been unable to figure out how the were generated. Any ideas would be appreciated. I've provided some examples at the link below. Thanks!
Are they valid files - ie can you open them as Bitmaps, or JPEGs
One suggestion is that they were deleted and then recovered by a program that could not recover the first letter of the file name and hence a symbol instead
The tilde symbol is used to prefix hidden temporary files that are created when a document is opened in Windows. For example, when a document "Document1.doc" is opened in Word, a file called "~$cument1.doc" is created in the same directory. This file contains information about which user has the file open, to prevent multiple users from attempting to change a document at the same time.
I suspect that the system was shutdown with open files and these artifacts weren't removed.
I did a search on Google for you. Here is the answer.
When scanning with HP PrecisionScan Pro v. 3.02 a copy of the image is stored in a temp file at C\Documents and Settings\Norman1\Local Settings\Temp as a Tif file (~LWF0001.tif). These temp files are not erased when you close HP PrecisionScan Pro and stay resident until the folder becomes full.
So the images in the folders are probably scanned from a scanner.
I did a search on Google for you. Here is the answer.
When scanning with HP PrecisionScan Pro v. 3.02 a copy of the image is stored in a temp file at C\Documents and Settings\Norman1\Local Settings\Temp as a Tif file (~LWF0001.tif). These temp files are not erased when you close HP PrecisionScan Pro and stay resident until the folder becomes full.
So the images in the folders are probably scanned from a scanner.
Thanks! My Googlefu must off because I couldn't find anything tangible when searching for this. It makes sense, the guy had a HP PrecisionScan LTX 1.2. Which I had suspected, but couldn't come up with anything on Google.