Windows tends to pile a bunch of junk at random, this small application, freeware, is supposed to clean it out. Not yet tested, but sounds promising, recommended on the techguide forums. Go to the Cleanup download page.

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However, before you use this, remember that the default cleanup deletes your cookies too, which you probably don't want, so make sure to use the custom feature, where you can preserve your cookies and anything else you might want to keep.
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I'll try it out. I do this myself pretty religiously, but a "backgrounder" would be REALLY nice.
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Works great. Only thing I didn't find a way to disable deletion of was the address history in FF. Minor annoyance; I keep most of the sites I visit regularly in Bookmarks, but tend to enter the first few letters manually - faster. Since I have a good memory it's not really a problem. There's probably a way to avoid getting all that deleted, I just didn't find it yet.
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I know what you mean about the history, I use it the same way.

One reasonably easy solution is to just copy history.dat from your user profile, rename it to say fred.dat, then run the cleaning utility, then go back in and rename the fred.dat back to history.dat.

Sort of a pain I admit of course. Did it mess with the form history etc?
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Don't know yet, but my guess would be yes.... still, a cleaner of this sort is valuable even with a couple of hinks.
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Has this cleaner been tested yet?

Any problem just manually deleting all my .tmp files?

I'm noticed also folders with names like "TempEI4" containing all sorts of Ei4xx.log files, and then (in this case) Unicows.dll. How to decided whether this can be dumped?
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By the way, the way windows handles temp files is an absolute outrage, it's simply unacceptable.

I see installs mushroom by gigabytes as temp files fail to get cleaned up as they should be.

And I see uninstall log files get inserted into temp directories, where they have no place, so if you delete the contents of the temp directory, the app won't uninstall.

the window system is so ridiculously primitive that it's actually hard to understand how they can even face themselves when they claim windows, any version, is a modern advanced Operating system.

Once you start running Linux based desktops, this stuff becomes painfully obvious. Crashes? Never. Temp files handled efficiently? Always. System cruft build up? Not a problem. Advanced system wide package management tools? Always, and radically superior to anything Microsoft or other software manufacterors attempt. And far more complete and integrated, debian's apt / dpkg system is lightyear's ahead of Microsoft's stuff.

My sidux install is the same size in root, except for new packages I've added, as it was the day I installed it. The system simply does not collect garbage like windows does, it cleans it up, the way all modern advanced operating systems do.

I do not miss windows in any way, and when I need to use a window application, I fire up vmware and run windows 2000 for that time, then shut the stuff down again. Windows in a bottle, that's the only place it should ever be allowed to touch the wilds.

But in answer, no, any ~ or .temp or whatever labelled file can safely be removed, just use the file type windows explorer column header to sort the files by type, then delete all of the temp types. That will leave a wide assortment of cruft, junk, attempted virus installs, spyware tools, and the like. By the way, windows media player is fond of placing a temp copy of every wm file it every runs in your user /temp directory, in your profile.
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>>By the way, the way windows handles temp files is an absolute outrage, it's simply unacceptable<<

Yep!!

The tmp files are easy enough to figure out, but the stuff left behind with various updater operations can leave people like me puzzling over what to do.

I notice recently that I've got a new folder on my data partition, named...

8a412396c7331eeb744cb8

It contains a file named: msxml4-KB927978-enu.log

Looks like it's a log file for installing this - Product: MSXML 4.0 SP2 (KB927978), which has all the indications of a Microsoft thingy. Does the system need to refer to this again? Do I need to refer to it again? Do I even want to think about it?

And in my Windows\Temp folder, what are all those files with names like ich5core.cat?

What's this file in c:\
c015271e-9382-4e99-86c7-9835c65cb9e8.cab

Short of my switching to Linus, which isn't in the cards, any suggestions what do to about this stuff? How would a utility know what's temporary in such cases?
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best you can do is watch the temp junk.

That's all I can say, this stuff seems to be getting worse and worse over time too.

Windows media player now puts ever copy of every song you played with it in a user temp directory.

So you just have to go through the junk and do the best you can do.

Temp stuff that is clearly labeled is just a fraction of what goes in there, after that, it should all be totally deletable, but it isn't.

So it's guesswork. If in doubt, I keep it. If it's small, and I'm in doubt, I keep it.

Large stuff is almost always just a temp backup and can be dumped. But you're on your own, the design and implementation is simply terrible, and is for me fast becoming a memory, except for client machines that mushroom up over time too, and require cleanings.

For some reason, MS never mentions this junk in their famous TCO stories.
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