How Google Desktop ruined my day

I am so smokin' mad about this, i gotta vent. And hopefully in the process, save somebody else from the same awful problem.

I have really liked Google Desktop - been running in on a high-powered Dell XPS Vista machine for about a year and use it regularly. Helpful for finding files, emails, outlook tasks, you name it.

But... it has a dark side.

A few days ago i noticed my backup drive churning away, ( ReadyNAS Duo - love it) but didnt think much of it. Today I got an alert saying my disk space was running out. it is a 1tb drive, previously about 2/3 full. What the... ?

On investigation, I discovered that there were thousands of folders in my backups, under users/[username]/Local Settings/Temp/ , with names like Temp1_filename.zip , all the way up to Temp162_filename.zip, where the filenames were actual zip folders elsewhere on my machine - including a huge archive of thousands of zipped fonts I've had forever.

Using Google (how ironic) I discovered - after a *long* time spent searching various forums, cursing Vista the whole time - I found a google desktop discussion group where, lo and behold, many many other Vista users are having the exact same problem!

So - the NAS is filling up with junk that is auto-copied from my user profile... not the NAS, not the backup program (MirrorFolder, which I still love though I doubted it for a while today, sorry MF) and also not Vista (which I cursed many times today but have now forgiven, though not entirely). Turns out it was Google Desktop - for some reason, starting about 3 days ago, it unzipped every single zip file on my computer into a folder in the users/[username]/appdata/local/Temp directory.

( Note the path on the NAS was different - apparently there is a vista 'thing' with the path for "local settings" and "appdata/local" ... whatever. Stupid Vista. )

After a while of cursing , muttering, deleting, waiting, deleting more... I think the files are gone. And just now, I calmly, happily deleted google desktop.

Don't be evil? Then... fix this issue!

Here is another user having the same problem - 6 months ago, with no fix! http://www.googpress.com/156/google-desktop-search-eats-gbs/

And here is a whole forum of people with the same issue, some just recently. http://tinyurl.com/d3zwf5

C'mon Google, this is insane !!

And yes, there is an option not to index zip files, and/or certain folders, but it does not prevent google desktop from doing it anyway. ( see forum link above ... i am not alone)

I can live without google desktop - but as of this day, I will not ever see the cheery google logo in the same light. If acting like a nasty virus, silently destroying disk space with no warnings is not Evil, I am not sure what is.

Thanks for listening. I hope this saves somebody else a few gray hairs.