Strange Empty Folders appearing in Root Macintosh HD

[jameskachan]

No idea what these are or where they came from or how to stop it in the future. That has happened to me in the past, however I just wiped/installed new a week ago and am getting them again.

thoughts?

 

[spinnerlys]

What applications have you installed since the reinstallation? Be as precise as you can.

 

[jameskachan]

I have MS word and excel from MSOffice 2008
Adobe CS5 suite
+Normal mac stuff, and a few random apps like appzapper.app, and tweetie.

Ive included screenshots of both the App and Utility folders.

iLife is NOT INSTALLED

 

[jameskachan]

Here is a screenshot of the info windows for each random folder.
As you can see theyre empty.

I might just delete them, I only post because this has happened before on a few installs, so.. im not sure whats doing it?

 

[maflynn]

I'm wondering if photoshop is using those folders. Did you make any changes to the configuration to photoshop?

Back them up and then remove them, Start running some apps to see if they re-appear.

 

[Daiden]

I am getting similar things happening on my MBP. I just noticed this folder, created yesterday at 7:54 pm EST. I haven't installed anything recently, the only thing I really did yesterday was change the language settings on my laptop (not to Japanese, which is the language used in the random folder), installed the new Firefox Beta, and updated some Google software.

Any reason to think this is potentially malicious?

 

[GGJstudios]

Any reason to think this is potentially malicious?

No way can a folder be malicious. What's inside it?

 

[LPZ]

I am getting similar things happening on my MBP. I just noticed this folder, created yesterday at 7:54 pm EST.

Open Console (in Utilities) and check some log files?

File->Open Quickly->Files->system.log

File->Open Quickly->Files->/private/var/log->install.log

Anything interesting happening yesterday at 7:54 pm?

 

[Daiden]

No way can a folder be malicious. What's inside it?

It's empty.

Open Console (in Utilities) and check some log files?

File->Open Quickly->Files->system.log

File->Open Quickly->Files->/private/var/log->install.log

Anything interesting happening yesterday at 7:54 pm?

This is actually very helpful, thank you.

I looked in the install.log and saw two installations (Firefox Beta and Google Voice & Video update), which makes me feel a little better about the whole thing since at least it wasn't anything that wasn't already on my laptop.

It looks like the system.log was cleared as of this morning, so I couldn't get anything from it.

I did check the console messages, and 3 correspond to that time: It looks like Microsoft Messenger 8 Beta crashed (I checked the crash log for that and didn't see anything obvious jump out at me) and also Google Chrome has 2 localization errors (which happen again at 8:08 so maybe that's not the issue).

I guess I'll keep an eye out for anything else strange happening.

 

[GGJstudios]

It's empty.

I'd delete it and not worry about it.

 

[LPZ]

It looks like the system.log was cleared as of this morning, so I couldn't get anything from it.

The previous contents are saved in compressed form. If you care, try

File->Open Quickly->Files->/private/var/log->system.log.0.bz2

I think this is yesterday's system.log file.

 

[Daiden]

The previous contents are saved in compressed form. If you care, try

File->Open Quickly->Files->/private/var/log->system.log.0.bz2

I think this is yesterday's system.log file.

Oh, you're right, I did find it and was able to open it. Saw a few Google Chrome errors (I didn't realize it had so many) but otherwise nothing that looks out of the ordinary. For those who are curious, the errors look like this:

Sep 14 19:54:26 Tyrus [0x0-0x291291].com.google.Chrome[5489]: 2010-09-14 19:54:26.491 Google Chrome Helper[10105:207] __CFServiceControllerBeginPBSLoadForLocalizations received error 1100 from bootstrap_look_up2

I'd delete it and not worry about it.

Since I couldn't find anything suspicious, this seems like good advice.

Thank you both for your help.