Roger, I am still unable to replicate the problem, but I seem to remember something about a piece of shareware that was supposed to preclude this sort of problem.
So I searched VersionTracker and found AutoPurge. According to the Product Description:
"AutoPurge is a small application that removes any unused items from the invisible "Temporary Items" folders on all mounted disks. In the past (Mac OS 8.6 and earlier), these items were removed by the OS itself, and placed in the trash. This is not the case in Mac OS 9.0. Applications place scratch items, cached, and other data in this folder, and then remove them when quit. If your Macintosh crashes while running these programs, those files are left behind. This can eat up LOTS of disk space in a short amount of time. If you are running low on disk space, but can't quite figure out why, this may be the case.AutoPurge is a simple solution to this problem. AutoPurge launches, checks the folders, looks at each item in the folder, and if it isn't currently in use, moves it to the Trash, then quits. All you have to do is empty the Trash. This is how the Mac is supposed to work. I recommend placing this item in your Startup Items folder inside the System folder to automatically launch at each startup."
Even though my IE Temporary Items Folder is not invisible, this does (IMNHO) sound like what happened.
BTW, I have since installed AutoPurge.
Harv
[ 02-20-2003, 05:54 PM: Message edited by: pendragon ]