What are these "SNOVE" folders that are appearing here and there?

they’re just popping up at random on a couple of my hard drives and pen drives, these folders containing a desktop.ini file and a pijes.exe file.
What the heck..?

Oh and when they appear after connecting the drive the Hd’s shortcut icon (from being a normal hd design) turns into a text-like icon. And the drive doesn’t autoplay.

Then when I cut & paste this folder into another within the same drive; disconnect and reconnect…
“pop” the autoplay is on and the icon is back to normal.

I’m not worried, just curious of knowing what it is I’m handling here.

P.S. I’m using Ubuntu 10.4, if that might help.
cheers.