Sixty-one Uninstall Folders

Hi All,

Recently I acquired a used HP computer. This computer has WindowsXP Pro, Service Pack 2 installed on a 40 gig hard disk. Upon examining the unit I came upon 61 folders in the Windows directory that had their text designation printed in a blue color, compared to the other Window folders, printed in black. The general format of the designation was $NtUninstallXxxxxxx$. The capital X could be any letter and the small x's were numbers. While I didn't examine each 'uninstall' folder some contained more than five MB of data. The Window directory had 2.06 GB.

Since I had never encountered this type and number of similar folders before, I'm looking for advice on what to do about them. Should I ignore them, remove them, or try to consolidate them somehow? Could they be part of the Service Pack 2 installation (or uninstallation)? My other Service Pack 2 computer has one similar folder but only 240 KB of data in it. Thank you.

 

They're folders that contain the uninstall files for the various windows updates. There may be one there for SP2 also, although I don't remember for sure if it puts one there or not. You can safely delete them if you're confident you won't ever want to uninstall them. I recently deleted all but the ones from the last couple months. I'll keep the new ones around for a while and delete them later.

You can search the MS knowledge base for the KB number in the name to find out what they're for.

If you delete them, they'll still show up in add>remove programs. There may be a faster way but to get rid of them there I just clicked to uninstall and since the uninstall files are gone it asks if you want to remove them from the list. Choose yes and they're gone. You have to do each of them one at a time this way though. I'm sure theres a place in the registry where you can edit them out but I haven't bothered to try to find it.

 

Zander,

I took your advice and examined some of the folders at the Knowledge Base site. Most of the information did not seem to relate to any items familiar to me, but occasionally there would be mention of Security Updates, Hot Fix, or SP3. It appeared that I could not do much with the folders, certain files within some folders prevented copying or moving to another location. Again, using your experience, I deleted them in groups and used the computer without any problems developing so far. Thank you for your helpful interest.