ASL folder ENORMOUS

[Matthew Smith]

A couple of weeks ago, after opening some very large files (with layers) in Photoshop, my Mac's HD space started to disappear. I have now, finally, located the cause (I think). I checked the system log (Stystem Profiler/Software/Logs/system.log) which was itself 4.5 GB in size (too large I think?). However, when I went to the file location (/var/log/system.log) I also noticed that the "asl" folder (in the same folder as the system log) was 20 GB in size!! Having read a few forum posts about similar issues, I took the risk of deleting both the system.log and the majority of files in the asl folder. This seems to have worked a treat (I now have 25GB returned to me).

As I said, this all started happening when I opened a few very big Photoshop docs. Do you have any idea what caused / is causing this to happen? I haven't opened Photoshop since deleting the asl files, but new ones still seem to be appearing in the asl folder. They are tiny (100KB at most) but I'm a little concerned I haven't fixed the problem. Any suggestions?

I can't see why new asl files would be appearing when I haven't even opened Photoshop.

I'm running on OS 10.5.8

Many thanks,

Matt

P.S. By the way, the size of the system.log seemed to be caused by a repeated message regarding RealPlayer, which I assume is unconnected, but I have included it below just in case (I've removed RealPlayer from my Mac to see if that helps, but the asl files still seem to be appearing):

Jul 28 18:16:07 localhost RealPlayer Downloader[299]: Failed to create window context device
Jul 28 18:16:09: --- last message repeated 1 time ---
Jul 28 18:16:07 localhost RealPlayer Downloader[299]: _initWithWindowNumber: error creating graphics ctxt object for ctxt:0x1152b, window:0xffffffff
Jul 28 18:16:07 localhost RealPlayer Downloader[299]: CGWindowContextCreate: failed to create context delegate.