My laptop keeps coming up saying that the HDD is nearly full. I do a check of how much free space I have and sometimes it's as little as 14KB. After doing a search around the HDD I always find that the file C:\WINDOWS\system32\LogFiles\WMI\trace.log is 16GB or so. I just delete the file and the problem is solved but it always comes back. I cannot open it to see what it contains as a 16GB text document just doesn't like to work. Especially when my computer is bordering on seizing anyway due to having no swap space. Does anybody know what this file is or what it does and more importantly what makes it? Any help would be greatly appreciated.

This may shed some light on your problem.
For more information about WMI have a look Here.
It may be worth downloading CCleaner to help rid your system of unwanted files.

Hope this helps