weird folder with ms printer drivers in my home folder

[Vitorio Okio]

On Wed, 11 Nov 2009 01:17:25 +0000, Vitorio Okio wrote:

> All at a sudden I've found a strange folder in /home on my Jaunty.
> 
> The folder is using apparently random 30 digits number for its name.  It
> contains 2 sub-folders: /amd64 and /i386.  Each of those in their turn
> contains a bunch of same files: several .dll's, .cat, .gpd, and .inf
> files.  According to a time stamp the folder is about couple of months
> old.
> 
> The .inf file in each mentioned above sub-folders suggests that these
> are files for "Microsoft system driver files for XPSDrv print drivers."
> 
> I cannot imagine how possibly this crap could happen in my /home on a
> pure Linux laptop that is operated within a pure Linux network
> environment.
> 
> Any suggestions folks? Should I be worried about integrity of my little
> network?
> 
> Though I do not see how possibly this junk could be used withing Ubuntu,
> especially considering its weird location in /home folder.

Well, I do not know how I've missed to mention it yesterday (I guess I 
was troubled by the story too much) but there was actually another folder 
in my /home in addition to all above.  

The folder named Recycled and contained desktop.ini and INFO2 files. 
INFO2 seemed to be a binary, since I was not able to open it in Text 
Editor. Everything including folder itself obviously belonged to Windows 
world.

The whole story does not make any sense to me.

No, I never installed/used MS Office under Wine, as Steven suggested.  
And no Windows files and folders do not exist anywhere else on my hard 
drive, as per Colin suggestion.

Here is the only speculation (possibly stupid) that comes into my head...

I did have a VirtualBox vm with WindowsXP guest at that time.  Could 
VirtualBox perform something totally insane?

Otherwise I should admit that there was an attempt to install something 
on my laptop without my knowledge remotely. Call it virus or warm, 
whatever it was...  But there is no way to explain a mysterious 
appearance of purely Windows files and folders in /home under Linux.