Unable to delete 12 GB of Temporary files. C Drive sometimes shows Red

For some time I have had a problem with the C drive showing Red, and then later on dropping back to blue.
I have plenty of spare room on my SSD, C Drive
Sometime a disc clean up will get the Red back in the Blue.
But not always.

And there is this stubborn stack of 12GB of temporary files, that will just not go away.
Some times it will go up to 13 + GB, and a disc clean up will reduce it back to 12, but not always.

Does anyone have any solutions to these two (Related ??) problems.

I believe that CleanMgr limits itself to ancient enough files (1 month iirc). It's safe to delete everything that's not in use or anything, but I like to see what I'm deleting. For instance in my W11 %temp% folder, from the files I'm seeing now, I don't delete (or try to delete) neither userName.bmp (instead of "userName", your user name) nor .ses . I'm also seeing a HWINFO64*.SYS dated when I've booted up this system, and I wouldn't try to delete that either because I've set that program to run from boot up. Normally you see these items if you pay a bit of attention. I also have an item related to Adobe Flash Player, a deprecated sw that I know is needed by some ancient sw here. The deletable stuff is also easily identifiable, like groups of *.tmp or *.log files that start with what seems a prefix (like MAR*.tmp or mat-debug*.log here). Do you have 12GB free in another drive, or in an USB stick, just in case?

First press Win-R and run %temp% ( C:\Users\userName\AppData\Local\Temp ). It will display a Window of the temporary files folder. The 12 GB might be in large items (files or folders) that you can associate to things like installing sw. Days ago I deleted several items larger than 1 GB that had been left by several installations of my printer software I did, trying and finally getting to fix printer issues.

In the said widow you can select everything, go through it a bit to deselect items that you think your software is needing, and press Shift-Del to delete the selected items (with only Del they would be moved to the Recycle bin and the disk space wouldn't be released). If you see prompts about not being able to delete something, click to skip those items.

Ghot said:

@FredM8


Open a command prompt as Administrator and run this command...

Dism.exe /online /Cleanup-Image /StartComponentCleanup /ResetBase

That seems to have done it !
Many thanks.
But it seems strange how it went about it. I ran the command as Admin and when I checked only a couple of GB had reduced.
Although the CMD prompt did say it had executed ok.

I ran the standard disk clean up a couple of times and it reduced the Temp files by a few GB each time.
Odd ?