On my computer running Windows XP I recently noticed a folder named ‘Recent’. It contains many shortcuts to files, some going back a year or more! This seems to be a waste of disk space, so is it safe to delete all the files in this folder? Secondly, until recently the computer was running Norton Antivirus 2005 with Zone Alarm. However, I have now upgraded to Norton Internet Security 2006. Before installing NIS 2006 I uninstalled ZoneAlarm, but have subsequently reinstalled the program. Is it alright to run both NIS and ZoneAlarm together? Finally, when completing a full system virus scan with NIS approximately 150,000 files are scanned, confirmed by Ad-Aware which scans about 145,000 files. However, recently for no apparent reason Norton is now only scanning 109,000 files. Is this reduction in files a problem, and do I need to take any action?

All the items in the Recent folder are shortcuts to recently opened files, and is designed to allow easy access to your most recently opened files. If not already, you can enable the ‘Recent’ folder on the start menu, allowing an easy way to view and open these recently opened files. As the items in the Recent folder are shortcuts and not the actual files, you should be able to safely delete the contents of the Recent folder. The easiest and safest way to clear the Recent list (to ensure you don’t delete any other important Windows files) is to use the Windows function to clear the Recent list. Right-click on the ‘Start’ button and select ‘Properties’. In the window that appears, select the ‘Start Menu’ tab and then click the ‘Customize’ button. Within the next window that appears, select the ‘Advanced’ tab. You will notice at the bottom of the window there is an area labelled ‘Recent documents’. To enable/disable the recent documents option in the Start menu tick/untick the box ‘List my most recently opened documents’. To clear the recent file list, click the ‘Clear List’ button.

Regarding running both NIS and ZoneAlarm, I would not recommend running these firewalls together. Both these firewalls are quite complex, with advanced features such as outbound program control, so there is large scope for conflicts between these two products. In any case, running both firewalls concurrently would not provide much (if any) increase in security given the capable nature of both these products. Therefore, you should choose one firewall to run on the computer.

Finally moving to your question about the number of files being scanned by Norton Antivirus, I would not be too worried about the difference in the number of files being scanned between these two products, as different products will always use differing methods of scanning files. Presumably you are running NAV in ‘comprehensive file scanning’ mode, and Ad-Aware in ‘full system scan’ mode. In theory, these modes should scan the entire computer for threats, so you would think they should scan the same number of files. In reality, this is not the case. For example, in ‘full system scan’ mode Ad-Aware will automatically scan within archive files (e.g. compressed files). On the other hand, NAV will not scan archive files in ‘comprehensive file scanning mode’ but instead you need to tick the option ‘Scan within compressed files’ within the NAV options. There are other factors as well, as different products scan using different methods which may yield different numbers of files being scanned. That said, the 36,000 drop in the number of files being scanned is quite significant, and I really can’t provide a definite explanation as to this behaviour. However, this is unlikely to be anything to worry about.