strange text files and installers in drive C

I just noticed that there are many strange files that appeared in my drive C that I have not seen before. The create date is on 11/7/2007. I bought my laptop in 2008 and have formatted it just a few months ago, so I am not sure why the create date is that.

Here is a screenshot of my drive C




I noticed that these files said they are from Microsoft's update. I am wondering are these safe or do I have some kind of virus on my computer =/? They were not there the last time I checked my drive C.

 

Open eula.1033.txt in notepad, it should hopefully be in English and be able to tell you what it is from.

 

It said some stuff about Visual C++. I got a little paranoid since usually window files should be in the window folder instead of in the C: directory.

 

Those appear to be installation files related to the redistributable for visual C (or visual C++). In that case, the "date modified" column most likely reflects the last time those files were modified by someone at Microsoft, not the last time they were written to your hard drive (e.g., during your last reformat/reinstallation).

If you go poking around in your c: drive and look at some of the other system files, you should see similarly old dates (or older). For example, I have a new system I bought last week, that was produced by the OEM some time during 2009. It came with _Vista SP1 pre-installed, and I haven't done a format or reinstallation, and nonetheless, I have system files (that I know are kosher Microsoft files and not malware files) with "date modified" dates going back to 2006 - three years before the computer was even in existence.

The reason you got a redistributable (unless you intentionally installed it yourself), is that you're running something else that needs some of the C++ runtime libraries to function correctly, and so those libraries were installed along with that something else. A basic description of the process can be had from this MSDN article.

Or, as MS puts it more succinctly on the download page for the VC++ 2005 redistributable:

Check to see if you've got a system folder named WinSxS (I'll bet almost anything you do) and check to see if the same files are in there as well. These particular versions may have ended up in root on c: if they were part of a so-called "private assembly" installation or an installer that was written by a really bad/sloppy coder.

 

Ding, ding, ding, ding! We have a winner. Anytime you see redistributable libraries like this in the root folder you can be pretty sure some idiot screwed up the installer package they created. And as Shyster said these MIGHT also be in WinSXS. But resist any temptation you might have to manually move them there if they are not. WinSXS needs more than just the presence of the files to be able to server them up to the apps that need them. If you can determine what application you installed that caused these to be there, you could try moving all of them to a folder, and then run that application to see if it complains. If it doesn't then copy the folder to a CD or DVD (just in case) and then delete the original.

Gary