Is ServicePackFiles folder safe to delete?

Wondering if anyone else is curious about this one.

During the installation of SP2 it creates the folder C:\windows\servicepackfiles\ and extracts approx. 478MB files into it. Seems like a lot of wasted space if all it's needs them for is the install.

On one of my test systems I first renamed that folder with no ill effects and then finally deleted it all together. Outside of some extraneous registry entries my registry cleaner found (and which I've cleaned out), I can't see any reason to keep this folder around taking of space.

Anyone with some thoughts on this?

 

During the Beta period, I dumped the $$uninstall folders, the CONTENTS of the driver cache dll. i386 and the CONTENTS of the service pack i386 folder. None of these is necessary for the day to day operation of Windows. It save a lot of room on the hard drive. It's not so much I needed room on the hard drive as much as I wanted to make a smaller footprint for ghosting the drive.

The problem with dumping the driver cache is it is necessary to come up with drivers for various hardware. If you make changes to Windows that requires the Windows disk, the files that are necessary may be in the service pack folder.

The small footprint was the biggest impeteus to slipstreaming: no $uninstall, no service pack folder, no system restore point. The total was about 1.3 GB or so.

So as long as you're not going to do any changes to your computer, the files aren't necessry.

 

After backing it up to a CD, I went to dump the SP2 uninstall folder, but it says that "rtcimsp.dll" is in use and cannot be deleted. A short hunt showed me that rtcimsp is something to do with "pay pal" and/or security for sending credit card info on the net.
Has anybody else had a problem deleting the SP2 uninstall file?
Regards
Rick

 

I have no need for ServicePackFiles folder

Thanks for your input folks.

I have no need to uninstall SP2 as I have a Ghost image of the system prior to installing it.

 

I had no problem removing any of those files. I removed $$unistall folder, but for the service pack it was just the contents of the folder.

 

I've removed the contents of the $$uninstall folder but like Kotare I got access denied for rtcimsp.dll. All other files were removed fine.

 

Just a note on removing the contents of the $$uninstall folder.

Found that after I did this the font used by Dreamweaver MX help files was corrupt. Reinstalling did not resolve the issue. Finally had to lay down a previous Ghost image and then install SP2 and Dreamweaver again.

I think I'll just leave the contents of that folder alone