Questions from my MoM and me

OK, deleted files:
No, they don't vanish completely. The 1's & 0's still exist unless you use a program like File Shredder (http://www.fileshredder.org/). What happens is the "space" can be reused, like painting on a used canvas. "Deleting" temp files makes the allotted space available to be reused calling it free space. There are tons of "recovery" programs that can find recovered files. Computer forensics. Deleting temp files can increase your speed.

Anti-virus programs are notorious for not playing well together. I used to have Avast & AVG on my computer, if I used one to scan while the other was on, they argued a lot and would shut down my computer. I dumped Avast because I liked AVG better. MY MOM's subscription to McAffee just expired and I had to delete it before loading AVG.

Instead of SAS, I'd recommend Glary Utilities (http://www.glaryutilities.com/), the free version is plenty good. Norton takes care of spyware and malware so I doubt that is the problem. Probably a lot of temp files and cookies.

Cookies are similar to Temp files in that they are "protected" space, deleting them turns that into "free" space. I clean them out every couple of months. Here is a quick look at cookie removal: http://www.pchell.com/support/privacy.shtml. PC Hell is a site with lots of information in one place. I have it bookmarked.

You won't do any damage removing all cookies, but some information can be lost with sites you visit frequently. Like the cities settings for Wunderground weather. I delete them one at a time (real fast) and delete stuff from sites I don't visit often or sites that will give new cookies every time I visit like news sites.

If you feel uncomfortable, don't do it. Do some research.