Folder won't stay deleted

I have an empty folder on a USB-attached expansion drive that won't stay deleted. I delete it and it disappears. But a few days later it reappears. There are no error messages when I delete it. I never restore the drive or do anything else (that I'm aware of) to recover the folder. This is not a big problem since the folder takes up no room (except for the directory entry) but I've very curious about this. At one time the folder was password protected and contained encrypted files with invalid file names (file names ending in .con) but all that has been cleaned out and the product doing it has been deleted. I had to use a command-line command - which I don't remember - to delete the files and used that command at least once to delete the folder. This time I won't try deleting the folder in case somebody has a suggestion for something I should try.

All my backups - the local copies of them - are on that drive. Formatting it is not a particularly good option.:) And the drive is permanently mounted; I never eject it.

I'll give CCleaner a try. I haven't run it for ages.

Interesting. I got the popup "Windows is unable to stop the device 'USB Mass Storage Device'. Don't remove this device while still in use. Close any programs using this device and then remove it." Nothing was obviously using the device but mystery folder had been moved to the drive's Recycle folder so maybe that "program" was Windows itself. In fact, that mus be because I just emptied the Recycle been and was able to remove the device. I'll now do the reboot and see what happens when I remount the drive.

pokeefe0001 said:

All my backups - the local copies of them - are on that drive. Formatting it is not a particularly good option.:) And the drive is permanently mounted; I never eject it.

I'll give CCleaner a try. I haven't run it for ages.

Hmmm Personally, I would never carry out any procedure in a drive that was my backup one (unless I copied it first).

I do make a copy of the back files once a week, but I'm not doing anything more unless the folder comes back. Actually, I don't think I've ever used CCleaner to clean anything. I've just run it to see what it thinks needs cleaning.

Solved. Dumb user error! The old folder used to have sub-folders I used as targets for downloads. My browser - Firefox - remembers download targets associated with websites. Every once in a while I do a download from one of those websites. (That happened yesterday.) I never go far enough to create a target sub-directory but I apparently go far enough to recreate the top level directory. This explains why it sometimes takes weeks to the directory to reappear.