9.2 GB Folder with unknown purpose in %programdata%

Just in case anyone here does not know - WinSxS is not the size it says it is, it lies, it tells fibs

WinSxS is actually a part of the Windows system that is in place to reduce the size of the operating system

I know this may seen strange but Windows has an issue due to it's long working life and the need to be backwards compatible with as many previous versions as possible

Over windows versions there are many versions of each Windows and related system files such as .DLL, and each program will look for it's own version that was there when it was designed, if it's not there it will install it either overwriting the current file or creating it's own local copy. .

What Windows does, (since Vista). is creates a symbolic link to the latest compatible .DLL and stores the Link in WinSxS, rather than install a Copy of the old DLL, ( which would cause either system issues for other programs or bloat from several very similar files scattered across the system ). As the program is instructed to find the .DLL in the WinSxS folder it always gets access to the Latest best file. It also applies to other system files

That explains the reasons behind WinSXS, but there is one major flaw in the system - Windows Explorer - this sees a Symbolic Link to have the size of the link target, this results in, e.g. ten symbolic links showing as different variations of a 50MB .DLL file to display in explorer as 500MB of files, when in reality the actual symbolic links are less than 1Mb in size in total - they are simple text files stating the address of the correct .DLL

If you check the size of the WinSxS folder with a file utility that displays actual file size not windows file size ( try something on a linux live disk), you should have a pleasant surprise

I have seen WinSxS folders that actually reported sizes that suggested that it and the rest of Windows was larger that the disk it was on - now that gets you thinking

C:\Program Data folder is mostly used by third party softwares to store info's such as: settings/preferences/Linsense Info/software updates/log files etc...
For example:
Revo Uninstaller by RS Revo group stores the lisense under RS Revo group\Revo Unstinstaller Pro
Macrium stores log files about each backup, PE files used to create Rescue disk etc...

It is strange that you have folders with just numbers nested so you either have some kind of malware or some badly written third party software. Try to see what's in the last nested folder to find out which software creates these folders.

Anyway, it is safe to delete these folders except you might have problem deleting them since the path is too long for these nested folders.

jimbo45 said:

Hi there
boot up any live Linux distro which has a GUI - then with the Live distros file browser just delete the files if Windows / File explore can't handle long file names. Linux doesn't have that file and path name length restriction.

You can create a bootable USB Linux Live distro by downloading the ISO and then using RUFUS to create a bootable USB from the ISO image. (Usually better than messing around with physical DVD's these days).

Linux Mint is good but here's a really easy one Live CENTOS with KDE. Easy Windows like GUI --the file manager (explorer) name is called DOLPHIN.

Right mouse click on the file / folder and choose DELETE

Index of /rolling/7/isos/x86_64

Scroll down the list and choose CentOS-7-X86_64-LiveKDE.iso.
It's 1.6G download and last update was last week (Apr 29 2017).

If there's any problem with handling NTFS files simply install ntfs-3g. Should be in there by default. Note it's a LIVE distro so changes to the OS aren't retained over re-boots.

Cheers
jimbo

True. Any linux would do, personally I would prefer Slacko Puppy linux because the file size is only around 200MB:
Download latest Puppy Linux release

If you get Kyhi's disk (my post #2) you get a lot of programs on it, and Macrium includes Fixboot - a good way of repairing boot problems.