I have a Windows XP Home Edition guest and a Linux Mint 13 host. I use VirtualBox and the ~/Public directory is shared with the guest. It sometimes happens that I use IE on the guest system to download files (until I get a better Windows browser).

All of the downloaded files go the the L:\ drive (the ~/Public directory). When they are finished downloading, Windows Explorer adds a :Zone.Identifier file for each file I download. When I extract a downloaded ZIP archive on the guest (on drive L:\), Windows creates a :Zone.Identifier file for every file in the extracted directory. This even occurs if I use the host to move a file to the ~/Public directory.

The shared ~/Public directory is on an ext4 partition and the colon character is supposed to be illegal in file names in Windows, but not on the ext4 partition. Is there any way to stop Windows from putting all this rubbish on my filesystem? (I might have to create a shell script to clean up after Windows' act.)

Here is what I see in Windows Explorer:

By the way, if I were running a Mac OS X host (where colons are illegal file name characters) this would be even more horrendous.