Hard drive filled to absolute brim, then suddenly freed up a frightening amount of space.

I use Windows XP Home SP2.

I was stupidly opening a very large MP3 file in Audacity, and it was
of course decompressing all of the data to my C:\ drive. Being that I
only had a few gigabytes remaining on said drive to begin with, the
hard drive filled up with the temp files Audacity was creating. And
when I say filled, I mean to the brim -- it had 220 KB left, warned me
several times in quick succession that the disk was filling/full,
before Audacity finally stopped the decompression.

After this point, the hard drive began massively freeing up space, and
ended at something like 17 GB remaining, less than a minute later.
The Audacity temp files were still stored on the hard drive, meaning
they were not removed in this massive freeing up of space. My
question is, in dire circumstances such as this, what order does
Windows remove things in? It reduces cache size first, but then
what? Is there a chance that any personal files were lost, or is
Windows smart enough to not let this happen? I mainly just need peace
of mind here (if applicable); not help recovering any files if they
may have been lost.

By the way, I do not defragment as often as I should. Not sure if
knowing this info helps.

Finally, don't be afraid to use tech talk... I'm pretty well-versed in
computers, but just not THIS particular area. Thanks much for your
help.

KS.

 

You should of been given a choice as to what to have removed, and they
are all TEMP files.
http://www.theeldergeek.com/disk_cleanup_utility.htm

 

I didn't go through the Disk Clean-up wizard, however I do think I
found out what was purged: everything slated for potential system
restore. That would make perfect sense, as the amount of space
cleared up happens to be synonymous with the size of my reserved space
for system restore. Luckily, I have no use for that and may just
disable that option now.

Thank you for your help.

KS

 

I have always had my restore turned off.
I use ERUNT instead
http://www.larshederer.homepage.t-online.de/erunt/

Takes up very little space and can be accessed when your system won't
start, where restore has to have a working OS.

Now would also be a good time to back up anything you might miss if
deleted.

 

You might not want to turn it off you never know when it will save your
butt. You can clean up the restore points by running the Disk Clean-up
wizard when it offers up what you want to delete go to the more options tabs
and there is a section there that lets you delete all but your last restore
points.