A possible cause for oddly named Preferences folders

Feb 16, '07 07:30:00AM

Contributed by: robg

A while back, I noticed that my user's Preferences folder was staring to accumulate some very oddly named (but empty) folders. How odd? Consider these actual folder names from my machine:


The folders would appear at seemingly random intervals, and I could safely delete them with no apparent ill effects. At first, I thought it might some weird form of hard drive corruption, but everything else was fine, and the folders only showed in my user's Preferences folder, so I was pretty sure it was related to an application. After a few months of manually deleting these empty folders every so often, I finally took the time to look for an answer...and found one, right here on the macosxhints forums.

It turns out it's related to the Epson TWAIN plug-in for Photoshop CS2. With the plug-in installed, a new randomly-named folder is created each time you launch CS2. I confirmed this by putting a folder action script on the Preferences folder, asking to be notified whenever a new item was added. Sure enough, the new folders were created only when launching CS2. If I removed the TWAIN driver, then no odd folders were created.

For now, I'm living with the randomly named folders, as I do use the TWAIN plug-in somewhat regularly. I've checked Epson's site, and there don't appear to be any newer drivers, so it looks like I'm stuck with the issue for a while. Hopefully this hint will allay the fears of anyone else seeing very strangely-named empty folders in their user's Library » Preferences folder.

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