Fixed .Mac iDisk Syncing with....Windows XP

I previously blogged about my .Mac iDisk synchronization problems I finally fixed my issue with Windows XP. This is not a Mac slam, but it does show what happens when you hid stuff from users sometimes and the software can't fix itself. I installed the iDisk utility for Windows XP to upload an image to my iDisk's Public Folder while I was at work on my XP box. You could say I was surprised when I saw a hidden .Something file in the Public folder. In my previous post, I mentioned that I was trying to upload a large file, and the upload timed out at one point. Well it seems pretty clear that the .Mac iDisk sync engine can't sort itself out in some cases, because it left this dead file behind and on the Mac as a regular user, wouldn't tell me about it. I deleted the file from Windows XP and got all my space back. I could have solved this on the Mac too by telling the Finder to show me hidden files or using Terminal, but I just expected this to work, even the failure cases, and it never occured to me the iDisk sync wouldn't keep a record of the attempted file upload and clean-up after itself. I suppose a transactional file system would have solved this too, perhaps "Tiger" will match the transactional NTFS in Longhorn, if it isn't cut :)