Okay folks here's something you might find interesting. After reading about the paranoia concerning the "really hidden files" I did some investigating and found some interesting things out. This is all relating to Windows XP, if you have another OS you'll have to try some variants of this information.
1.) The command "dir /a:" will display ALL files in a given directory, hidden folders, system folders, hidden files, system files etc. Notice that there is nothing after the colon.
2.) Turning on the Do not hide files option and the Show operating system files option will also display ALL files and folders in exploder.
3.) Internet Exploder caches the web sites that you have visited and Temporary Files size must be set to an integer between 1 and whatever, not to 0. (to be explained later)
4.) The index.dat files are your enemy, they keep the info from the web sites you have been visiting and the parameters for all the Internet searches you have been doing. In Windows XP, they are located both in [Drive Letter}:\Documents and Settings\%username%\Local Settings\Temporary Internet Files\Content.IE5
and ...\Local Settings\History\History.IE5
and ...\%username%\Temp\Temporary Internet Files\Content.IE5
and ...\%username%\Temp\History\History.IE5
Now here's the action part.
1.) Go into Safe Mode Command Prompt Only
2.) Choose the user whose profile you want to safeguard
3.) Goto the above directories and delete the index.dat from each of them
4.) Create a text file called index.dat with whatever info you want
5.) "attrib +r index.dat" - sounds easy huh?
6.) Remember to make an index.dat file for each one you del
7.) Use "dir /a:" to view the "hidden directories under both the Content.IE5 and History.IE5 directories.
8.) Edit the desktop.ini files in the "Temporary Internet Files" and "History" directories to remove all lines but the first line
9.) Now you can goto the exploder gui and navigate to the directories, view the contents and delete all directories under the "Content.IE5" and "History.IE5" directories
10.) Restart the system and go into the Internet Exploder
11.) Check out the Tools->Internet Options-> Settings button. It should read 0 at this point.
12.) These steps do not disable cookies so that is a similar but seperate process
I have noticed that Internet Exploder is a little slower than before this process, but it will not write to the index.dat files after this process, and if it is writing ANY files to the hard drive they are the most hidden files you will ever get. You must do this for each user as well.
DOS Nav Hint in XP - For those familiar with Linux when typing in the names for the really long or weird named directories, just type in the first few characters of the name then hit the TAB key, the shell will fill in the rest of the DIR or FILE name for you. Works great for the really long file and dir names.
