Incredible Shrinking Hard Drive - Where's it all going?

OK. Here is something i have never experienced or heard about.
This afternoon i was playing NWN2 (btw, terrible game, avoid). And a Finder message appears that my Statup disk was running out space. which was odd, as of this AM, i had 98GB available.
I sat and watched it go to 0k...
I restarted, and trashed a few things in my Trash Can and i went from 0k to 18.07GB, and it stopped reducing available space.
Still odd...
Disk Utility reports 232.0GB capacity, and 214.0GB used and a clean bill of health.
I added up the calculated sizes of the 4 top level folders on the HDD:
User: 92.72GB
Applications: 28.36GB
Library: 12.87GB
System: 4.03GB
total used according to THOSE numbers should be approx 138.0GB, that number corresponds to my morning number of 98GB, i am missing 80GB of space.
What the heck is happening?
I installed MacTuneUp this afternoon, played around with it for 5mins, before realizing it was a waste of money, but really didn't do anything.
where'd my Hard Drive go? i want it back!
there has to be a huge invisible file that something must have created. how do i find it and kill it? I am using an iMac Intel 10.5.2
Message was edited by: Erin Waddington

You can try flushing the system cache, although if you're missing GBs of space, chances are that's not the problem (my system cache usually goes nowhere above 100MB). Here's how to do it if you want to try:
In terminal, type the following lines:
cd ~/Library/Caches
rm -rf *
cd /Library/Caches
rm -rf *
When you try the second rm command, it'll ask you to enter the sudo password, as you're accessing root-level data. It's a safe procedure, though; I do it on my system all the time (if you don't believe me, call Apple Support...they're the ones who told me it was safe). Be careful not to do anything other than that though or you could screw some things up.
Also, while this is safe, on a related note, be particularly wary when anyone tells you to do rm -rf * on any directory that doesn't begin with ~.

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