Why So Some Downloads Come With An Irremovable File Or No Extension

[oldgamerz]

I used to download a lot on the internet, and sometimes when I would download something, usually something like a program or a video game mod for example, I would sometimes get a seemly useless file along with my download

Sometimes it would not have a file size or even a file extension, I used to force delete these files and 100% of the times I did this, nothing would seem to happen, the mod just worked fine without it.

Sometimes I would change the file extension, change the code or rename the file, and pry the unknown files off my computer, first off no malware detection program ever saw one of these files as a threat,

What are these files used for?

I believe that these useless files were malware, hence the reason why I could not remove them off my windows 7 or XP computer. without bitterly prying them off my computer

Sometimes the files I would delete had 1-5 kilobytes, tell me what would have happened if I left these files alone?

Just curious if I was right about these things being no good or malicious

[tripredacus]

This is all way to generic of a question, with no real information. I have no idea what these files are that you are referring to.
If you still have any of them, you can upload them to somewhere so that I can take a look.

[oldgamerz]

This is all way to generic of a question, with no real information. I have no idea what these files are that you are referring to.
If you still have any of them, you can upload them to somewhere so that I can take a look.

to better explain it the files. are some of the ones in which windows cannot identify. by default and have the white icon, if you highlight them all you see is the word "file" and it usually displays as 0.kbs.

and you cannot delete some of them when you use the standard "delete" option. Windows will not let you delete them using normal means. you either would get error "access denied" or file in use or something like that

I don't have those files anymore the last time I had one of them was 1 PC before this one.

I found it vary useful to open the zip folders to see the contents not extracting, "copy and paste instead" it can sometime prevent these unknown  files from attaching to your computer.

again removing these unknown files seem to not do anything bad to the program or the the PC OS itself, but

It would seem to me it's some kind of malware, I ran into a lot of these, yet I almost always used a trusted source. and not everything I would download had these mystery files in them

[tripredacus]

It is possible they are the placeholder files used for downloading. When you download a file with a browser, the typical process is that a placeholder file is created in the download location. Sometimes they have no file extension, sometimes the extension is .part, it depends on the program. The actual download location is in AppData. When the download is complete, the placeholder file is replaced by the actual file. Until that takes place, the browser will have a handle open on the placeholder and you won't be able to delete it unless the handle is closed. Either closing the handle manually or killing the process which in turn closes all handles.