disk space and junctions

[C. Handler]

I've been getting quite an education.
We've been suffering from Vista problems from the day we bought my son's Lenovo laptop.

The first thing I learned about vista was that creating a restore point several times a day (the default scheduling) eats up a 120GB disk in no time.

Lately however, he's down to 12GB and it's not the restore points doing it.
I downloaded a utility called DIRUSE to try to figure out where all the disk space has gone and finally learned why there are so many inaccessable system folders. I found out about junctions; specifically the Application Data junction, which was being read recursively by the utility.

At some point I must have unprotected it. Before that I guess it was invisible, so it wasn't read at all.

It would seem that having an unlimited number of appdata directories can be interpreted by the operating system as having lots and lots of files on the disk.

What gets me is that autochk (the chkdsk utility that is run upon reboot) is too stupid to report the actual amount of disk being used. Or maybe I'm wrong and there's some other reason the system is reporting that there is so little disk space.

I'm not sure I know how to undo the problem.
Should I just go to security for Application Data and click deny all for everyone?
Will it even let me do that?
What's the point of having an Application Data folder if it is totally blocked?
I'm so confused.

Any help you can provide will be appreciated.