Search your drives for a file named mscreate.dir. I found 138 instances of this read-only, hidden, zero byte file on my Windows 95 system. Since I have a 2 G hard drive, each of these consumes 64K bytes of storage, for a total of
Sources on the web say that Microsoft Fast Find creates these. However, I have had the Fast Find pest disabled for several months now and over 50 of the goodies showed up when I installed Microsoft Visual Basic 6.0. (There are several mirrors of this source.)
According to Windows 95 Annoyances, these files are completely useless and can be deleted.
According to Microsoft, the Setup program creates these in every directory that Setup creates. When you use Setup's maintenance mode to remove an application, these flags indicate whether or not an empty directory should be removed - only those which contain mscreate.dir are removed; otherwise empty directories are not removed.
9 meg seems like a pretty large tax for the privilege of using inferior software. :(
On the other hand, dir /v (Verbose mode) says that no bytes are allocated for these files.
(Loading VB 6.0 also loaded IE 4.7 which I do not want. Some VB 6.0 programs that you write require that you distribute IE 4.7, otherwise, your program won't work.)