Losing Hard Drive Space at a rapid pace

I'm losing hard drive space, several gigs in an afternoon, while sitting still.

I have a 70gb HD on an Acer Laptop running Vista Home 32bit. I've been having problems for a week or two, but today I deleted quite a bit and moved some other stuff to an external drive. This freed about 10gb, which is now down to 2.5, 4 hours later.

Currently running malwarebytes, and Auslogics Disk Defrag. Already ran cccleaner, and online virus scan from Trend Micro. My normal virus program is Comodo, and it runs regularly (and manually today).

I did the Disk Clean and deleted the old system restore files.

Help please, I'm pulling my hair out!!

Welcome
Read and understand this
How to Fix Shrinking Disk Space in Vista » My Digital Life
Then we can talk (or at least type)

Read and understood.

Malwarebytes is still running and has found 2 infected objects, here's hoping that was the issue. But in case it's not....any additional suggestions?

See how much space system restore is using by putting this into a cmd prompt.

vssadmin list shadowstorage /On=C:

Used Shadow Copy Space: 12.432GB
Allocated Shadow Copy Space: 12.891GB

I think the investment in hard drive space is well worth it for the benefit of System Restore. If you dont want that protection, then delete the points.

I'm fine with it taking that space if necessary. Here's the dilemma...I suspect it was taking that space a week ago. And a week ago I was not losing hard drive.

Now I am losing hard drive. I can delete stuff off and see the regained space. Then within hours most of that regained space is lost.

I don't think the system restore is what's causing that. Ideas?

OK
Lets go this way first
Run a full anti virus scan after update
Download and run a full malwarebytes updated scan.
If negative
Downlad and use windirstat, it will show what on hard drive.

Dont take the short cut and eliminate the Malware scans, as they can hide.

Full virus scan was negative. Malwarebytes (just finished) had 2 errors, which I elected to delete. I ran windirstat to completion but have no idea what I am looking for.

OK do both scans over. Do A Full Scan. They will take at least an hour and half for both.

I reran both scans and both are negative. It's morning now, almost 8 hours later. As I went to bed both scans were running and nothing else was running (to my knowledge). I had about 2gbs of space showing available when I went to bed.

As I get up to check the status of the scans, it now seems I have 12gbs available on the hard drive.

I'm confused to say the least.

Maybe it was in the middle of a defrag when you had the high reading

I did in fact run a defrag yesterday evening but it had finished before I reran the virus scan and malwarebytes. So it wasn't running (again, to my knowledge) when I went to bed (and when the hard drive space showed very low).

Download and use windirstat. It will show how space is being used.
http://windirstat.info/

I ran it, but I don't understand what it is I am supposed to be seeing (or looking for).

Give us a screen shot.

I've attached the screenshot here.

Click on the plus sign by acer.
When the tree comes down, click on the plus sign by the biggest space hogs and show us all shots.

Here you go, let me know if I need something else.

Under the windows tree, winsxs is the biggest hog. Expanding that one, there's no one thing taking any great amount of space.

Winsxs is normal. That means windows side by side. It is drivers etc that are shared by more than one software. You cannot delte any thing there without looking for trouble.
Let me see users expanded. Dont just tell me about it.