Windows 10 & 11 create tons of empty folders in System32

Windows 11 creates lots of empty folders in a System32 directory - gHacks Tech News



I found 2200 of them on my Windows 10 install, and 180 of them on my recent Windows 11 install.

C:\Windows\System32\config\systemprofile\AppData\Local


They're all empty folders, beginning with tw and ending with .tmp
Deleting them seems to have no side effects.

I have exactly 800 of them on my compliant 11Pro282 system, and 1,200 of them on my non-compliant. Seems to be 20/day.

They're all empty folders, so they take up no space on a drive. Is there some reason why you think they should be deleted?

Wisewiz said:

I have exactly 800 of them on my compliant 11Pro282 system, and 1,200 of them on my non-compliant. Seems to be 20/day.

They're all empty folders, so they take up no space on a drive. Is there some reason why you think they should be deleted?

Not really. My OCD doesn't like them. Seems to be really sloppy coding though.
I mean, the programmers couldn't add a line or two that deleted the older ones after say, four or five of those folders. LOL

Phone Man said:

"TONS" How do you weigh a folder?

With your nose. If they smell like coding carelessness, they're heavy.

Oh no! Are we now going to discuss our medical conditions and our personal hygiene?

There is a thread about this on Tenforums, there is a login task that creates those folders, disable the task, folders don't get created, Windows still works fine. Search the thread, I forget what the task is exactly.

Pejole2165 said:

There is a thread about this on Tenforums, there is a login task that creates those folders, disable the task, folders don't get created, Windows still works fine. Search the thread, I forget what the task is exactly.

From the ghacks article...

Günter Born suggests that the temporary folders are created by the Provisioning Package Runtime Processing tool, filename ProvTool.exe. The tmp folders can be deleted and deletion appears to have no negative impact on the system.