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Got to say, been using Ubuntu for 3+ years now, never encountered anything like this.

I'm guessing here but it might be .xsession-errors

I've had it filled up once, because vinagre disagreed with some other library and it kept printing the same error message over and over. After several days it filled up the hdd.

Not saying it's vinagre's fault, just that it might happen and it's a "hidden ." log file

Yup, that one.

I'm not saying it was a hard problem to diagnose - I mean, the file was right there in the home directory.

Figuring out how to turn it off, by the way, was a little more involved.

I have a fairly vanilla install and quickly looking at my /etc/rsyslog.d/*.conf files shows 0 hidden files defined.

Similarly, /etc/logrotate.conf doesn't "hide" any files after rotating.