Recovery Drive D Question

I'm always getting a distracting message about not having enough room in my "D" Drive (which is my recovery drive)...and it prompts me to go in and free up some space. When I do check the Drive its "Properties" say its full (11.7 GB...with only 5.72 MB still empty). Looking inside the Drive to see what can be deleted to make room, I see there are just 3 files listed as being in there: The 1st file in there takes up 0 bytes, 2nd takes up 4.46 MB, and the 3rd takes up 4KB. But this D Drive is supposed to hold 11.76 GB. I don't know why it says its full if its only using up such a small amount of space. Can some one please explain to me what my problem is here? And what I can do to fix it? This is a fairly new set-up...had it less than a week now. Only files I've been able to dump in there have been the Recycle Trash Can...but even that is already empty.

By the way....the PC in question, is a HP Pavilion dv6830us (notebook)....with a 250 GB Hard Drive, 3 GB RAM, 1.83 GHz Intel 2 Duo Processor. I did make 1 (2-disk set) Recovery Disks 2 days ago on the CD +/- Drive. It failed to make an entire Recovery file on the D-Drive, saying there wasn't enough room on the disk to do it. That's about all the info I have about it, that I know of. I'm pretty new at this Vista stuff.

Well...It looks like I've answered my own questions. It seems like what I needed to know regarding this annoying problem, and how to correct it, could be found at the HP Help website:

HP Notebook PCs*-* Low Disk Space Error Appears During or After Backup*

It describes step-by-step how to go in and delete a couple files in the D Drive's Recovery Partition. And then how to set it up for all future back-up files to be saved to a disk using your DVD Drive, rather than prompting you to save it to the D drive. Having it set to save your back-up information to the small D drive partition is what makes your PC display the message telling you there's not enough room left on that Drive. And believe me...you'll be getting that message all the time...not just when its time to do a back-up. So now since I've just completed the procedure described at this help site...I'm hoping this'll end my problem once and for all. If it doesn't, you might see me back in here again asking you guys to help me out. I hope this helps any of you that find yourselves with a similar problem. Thanks.