Came across an interesting issue today while cleaning a Malware infection from a client computer. Once I had cleaned the system up enough to load Windows XP in normal mode, I noticed a strange icon in the system tray. It was a large red circle with a white X, and when the mouse was hovered over the icon the message “Warning! You have exceeded your profile space by XXX KB” was displayed. Opening the program displayed a more detailed message:
Profile Storage Space
You have exceeded your profile storage space. Before you can log off, you need to move some items from your profile to network or local storage
This was on a computer that is not attached to a domain, with no quotas enabled by the administrator.
It seems that the Malware infection implemented a local security policy on the PC restricting the users profile storage space. Manually deleting unneeded files from My Documents to reduce the size of the profile had no affect.
Luckily I came across this registry modification that removed the quota and corrected the problem.
Take this code and paste it into notepad. Save the file as quotarem.reg (make sure to save as type All Files to avoid the .TXT extension) and then double click on it to merge the changes into your Windows registry.
Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00 [HKEY_CURRENT_USERSoftwareMicrosoftWindowsCurrentVersionPoliciesSystem] "EnableProfileQuota"=- "ProfileQuotaMessage"=- "MaxProfileSize"=- "IncludeRegInProQuota"=- "WarnUser"=- "WarnUserTimeout"=-