Glad I looked this up. I would have jacked up my friend’s new windows install and had to start over again. Thanks for the info.

@Richard Hunter: Generally, all of the sub-folders are named after the hotfix update they belong to. But, that’s not enough to say the folder you mention is malicious. I’d suggest you do a full virus scan. Preferably, also do a scan from outside of Windows by using a Live CD or by connecting your hard drive to another computer.

Ryan, I suspect that people want to delete the $hf_mig$ folder because they believe it is harboring malware. I was infected and have been repeatably reinfected even when I have not been on-line, so my malware scans have been missing something. I have a subfolder with a very long name that appeared in $hf_mig$ about the time I was infected. Windows won’t even allow me to open it (access is denied). Its called {29F8DDc1-9487-49b8-B27E-3EOC3C1298FF}. Can I kill it? Do you know what it is?

[...] those folders. You can delete any of the folders that start and end with a “$”, except for “$hf_mig$”. Depending on the number of updates you have installed, deleting these folders can save [...]