After reading your item on Huge XP (8 October), I noticed that my Vista Home Premium hard drive has a giant folder, C:\Windows\winsxs, containing 8130 folders, 33,625 files, and occupying 7.24GB. It grows every time updates or applications are installed. Does internal housekeeping ever shrink it?
Ken Lee
WinSxS is the Windows Side-by-Side directory, which stores operating system components such as dlls. (If you've installed old programs that need old dlls, there could be multiple copies of those.) For protection, it is owned and controlled by a "Trusted Installer" service, not by you. It's hard-linked to all the software on your hard drive, so you should not attempt to move it, delete parts of it, or otherwise mess with it. It's what keeps Vista running reliably by, for example, replacing damaged or corrupted files. Internal housekeeping can shrink it, if you uninstall unwanted software.
Incidentally, Windows XP also has a WinSxS folder, though it's usually small.
