File Compression

Hello Forum: I have a general question. Why would WindowsXP continue to compress files even though I put in "60" days as the wait time before compressing files. I did this in the 'disk cleanup' utility option. It is my sister's computer and when I ran disk cleanup the first time there were over 400 MB in Temporary Internet Files and 2.2 GB !! in compressed files. I deleted all .  Two minutes later I ran disk cleanup again and there were 405 MB in compressed files. And this was after setting options to 60 days. It was set at 50 days before that. Is this a simple fix? What am I missing? She has an older PC with only 225 MB RAM.     An AMD Athlon processor 2GB. Windows XP with IE 7 . Comcast  broadband ISP. And.... the computer is slow. Even on the Web. Any help would be appreciated. Thanks

Disk Cleanup shows the amount of space that would be saved if you were to select the option for it to compress old files.
Hope this helps.

Thanks for the feedback Calum. In Disk Cleanup , if I check the 'compressed old files' block and hit OK, Windows will delete all the compressed old files that are in there. Yes?Now if I don't want windows to compress old files any more(or for at least 60 days) there should not be any more files compressed for 60 days, right? That's why I don't understand how 405 MB ended up in 'compressed old files' 5 minutes later. I expected  Disk Cleanup to show 0 MB after I told it to delete all the first time I ran it.  405 MB is a lot to compress in 5 min. I thought.  I still don't know how she got 2 GB !! in compressed old files from the start.  Right now I have 15 days selected before compression in my computer and there are 0 MB in compressed old files. If I am misunderstanding this please let me know.  Thanks again.

When you set the number of days, you are setting the number of days since a file was last accessed.

Example: Number of day set to 60:  file created sixty days ago and not accessed since then will be compressed.   The next day you run Cleanup other files will have existed and not been accessed for sixty days so they are compressed.

Cleanup does not delete any files in the Compress Old Files category, they are only compressed and if accessed will automatically be expanded.

OK Dusty. Understood. Thanks all for the help.