In doing some searching around my boot drive with File Commander I was looking in C:\\Documents and Settings\\Me\\Local Settings\\Temp\\ and found about 30 very large, fairly old, files named ?GD* with the same size. There was some other crap in there too, naturally, but there seemed to be about 14 GB of temporary files somehow related to Google Desktop. Since there was only about 14 GB of space free on the drive after I deleted them, I wonder if the system was simply close to running out of space on the boot partition without me knowing it. (The pagefile.sys is on another partition.)

That GDS installation also has [link|http://desktop.google.com/plugins/i/tweakgds.html|TweakGDS] and [link|http://desktop.google.com/plugins/i/gdsextreme.html|Google Desktop Extreme], so they might have something to do with the [link|http://z.iwethey.org/forums/render/content/show?contentid=233365|strange behavior] too. But it seems more likely that my installation is bonkers.

Those ?GD* files seemed to have information from files on shares on the network too. Since I wasn't telling it to search virtual drives from the network, I was surprised by that. I thought GDS only searched local hard drives by default. And that's supposed to be the case for this version, but apparently wasn't the case for earlier versions. [link|http://desktop.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=24770|This] FAQ answer isn't as clear as it could be (it says remote Office files are indexed as you use them).

(Of course, I may be misremembering and/or misinterpreting several things so don't take this as gospel.)

I'll let Copernic finish indexing then play with it a day or so before going back to try GDS again (after cleaning up all previous remnants). If things work better, I'll report back.

Regarding the weather thingy, there's [link|http://z.iwethey.org/forums/render/content/show?contentid=208393|Beep's] suggestion of [link|http://forecastfox.mozdev.org/|Forecast Fox] for Mozilla, but it obviously doesn't sit in the Windows tray. (It was interesting, but the updates were distracting IMO. The radar graphics weren't quite what I was expecting either but I don't recall what exactly I disliked about it.) [link|http://www.donationcoder.com/Reviews/Archive/WeatherTray/|Here] a site that lists several weather tray thingys with blurbs about each one. I've not tried them.

You could also go [link|http://www.bbc.co.uk/webcams/ukcams.shtml|here] and simply grab a web cam of interest. :-)

Thanks.

Cheers,
Scott.

That's about the weirdest bit of functional civil engineering I've ever seen. When I first saw the picture I thought the whole span moved up and down and wondered - What, do they move a Feris wheel back and forth underneath it? The wikipedia link helped clear that up. :-)

The [link|http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forth_Bridge_%28railway%29|Forth Bridge] is neat too. My father has a book on it (I've not seen it).

[link|http://www.instacam.com/showcam.asp?id=ALVND&size=S|Here]'s a webcam at an elementary school a few miles from me. It's a bright sunny day but cool (a windy cold front came through yesterday).

Cheers,
Scott.

I made sure C:\\Documents and Settings\\Me\\Local Settings\\Temp\\ was empty, uninstalled GDS, then reinstalled it. I haven't yet reinstalled GDExtreme or TweakGDS. It's been indexing about 14 hours and has completed a little over 555,000 files.

So far, everything is acting very nicely. The CPU load is staying low when it's not indexing, and it's not intrusive. I've got the Sidebar turned off an am using Konfabulator with the Calendar, Analog Clock, NOAA weather radar, Google News, Simple Monitor, and The Weather widgets and everything is behaving fine. There's almost nothing in ...\\Temp\\ but the indexing isn't complete. ...\\Local Settings\\Application Data\\Google\\Google Desktop\\ has about 2.4 GB of stuff at the moment. I still have 13 GB free on C:\\

I didn't do a lot with Copernic, but it seemed to be less friendly - system-response-wise - in indexing than GDS at the moment. I didn't care for the interface much either, but we'll have to see if I end up going back to it.

More sometime later if I have anything to add.

Cheers,
Scott.