Mok-Kong Shen wrote:

[snip]

Following a suggestion I got elsewhere, I installed Spybot.
It found over 60 problematic items, which were said to be Cookies
(which I interpreted to mean not being spyware as such). After
removing these, I was surprised to find that "dir"-command
gave 228.194.070.528, which is even much bigger than the
figure at the time of my first test reported (226.668.072.960).
Of course, as layman I don't understand what has actually
happened. But anyway, my original fear, that my free disk
space would be fairly quickly exhausted, is (at least for
the moment) gone.

Mok-Kong