HP Officejet J4680 software creates an unwanted file.

[justacruzr2]

Ever since I installed the Media Center Edition 2005 over XP Pro SP3 I've been getting this Ÿ9Ÿ9 zero byte file in my Docs and Settings\my account folder. It is locked but I can delete it with Unlocker. This problem happens everytime I boot into the system. It keeps getting made again. This seems to be a problem between the OS and the HP Digital Imaging software. I have already re-installed the HP Digital Imaging software but the problem persists. I would like to stop this from happening. I have already tried Googles' AI but its' suggestions are getting me nowhere. I did have this problem before in my parallel XP Pro system but somehow I got rid of it. That was 6 years ago and I don't remember how. There is no reference to this file in the registry. That's why I'm asking any of you if you had this same problem and what you did to fix it without creating a dummy file or stopping the HP Digital Imaging Monitor from running at startup. Those were not the things I did on my parallel system. I did run Process Monitor to catch where/when this is happening and here are the results:

Date: 3/28/2026 7:03:52 PM
Thread: 3540
Class: File System
Operation: CreateFile
Result: SUCCESS
Path: C:\Documents and Settings\Terry\Ÿ9Ÿ9

Desired Access: Generic Write, Read Attributes
Disposition: OpenIf
Options: Synchronous IO Non-Alert, Non-Directory File
Attributes: N
ShareMode: Read, Write
AllocationSize: 0
OpenResult: Opened


Can anyone help? Are you smarter than Googles' AI? Thanks.

 

[davidparker]

Yeah, that weird file is a known quirk with HP Digital Imaging on older XP builds, it keeps recreating a temp file at startup due to a compatibility glitch.
Best fix (without disabling it) is to update to a newer HP driver/software version or install in XP compatibility mode, otherwise it’ll keep coming back

-David Parker

 

[justacruzr2]

Yeah, that weird file is a known quirk with HP Digital Imaging on older XP builds, it keeps recreating a temp file at startup due to a compatibility glitch.
Best fix (without disabling it) is to update to a newer HP driver/software version or install in XP compatibility mode, otherwise it’ll keep coming back

-David Parker

OK. Thanks. I couldn't find any information out there about this. Not even HPs' website. Wish I could remember what I did in my parallel XP system. Anyway there were some updates to my HP software (v10) that I downloaded from HP. Maybe one of them will correct the problem.