Random .exe's in my C:\Windows

i've been doing a lot of scans recently just to make sure my computer's clean. i've used malwarebytes, spybot, and ad-aware... and just scanned my computer with most recent virus definition using Avira Antivir.

i was randomly going through my C:\Windows directory and i noticed some weird .exe files... i really haven't paid any attention to this folder before until now so they could have been there for a while; i'm not sure.

anyway i see these files:

system.exe
desktop.exe
mstask1.exe
mstask2.exe
seksdialer.exe

all of them are 0 bytes and all were last modified on 8/11/2004 @ 22:46. i did have a problem with a trojan agent before when i just upgraded to windows SP2... not even sure how i got it. i wasn't sure of the name of the trojan but it created an msnnoed.exe that became a running process in my \WINDOWS\SYSTEM32 directory which kept on coming back when i deleted it. later on turns out that there was a different program mscnco.exe that most likely was recreating it so i was able to disable it and remove it in safe mode.

i'm not sure what that trojan agent did... nothing seemed out of the ordinary or strange. the 2004 dates of these files above look familiar and if i remember correctly, the msnnoed.exe and the mscnco.exe files also had 2004 dates. i wonder if those programs created these other files.

my malwarebytes, virus scanner, and ad-adware picked up nothing.

do you know what trojan i had and is it safe to delete these files, assuming that i can? or do you think something else caused the creation of these random files?

Edited by Rutt Roh, 22 January 2009 - 11:17 PM.

Did the folder these files were in have a name? I'm thinking it is a quarantine folder but I'm not sure

yeah all these files were in C:\Windows and all were 0 bytes.

i'm not sure what created them, but i deleted them and they haven't come back. i'm curious though, would you guys have any idea what created them? perhaps it was the combination of mscnco.exe (which creates an entry in your windows services which is labeled as "MS Database Manager") and it's associate file - msnnoed.exe that created these weird files.

what do you think?

Not really sure. I'll dig into it a little deeper when I get the chance