Hi, I thought I'd do a bit of temp file removal and defrag my machine today. I deleted the temp files from the Local Settings/Temp directory but whilst in there, I noticed there are 190 Windows Installer Patch files occupying 750MB! As they are in the temp directory, my inclination is that they can be deleted, but I'm always a bit nervy about deleting things like this. Can anyone tell me whether these are something to delete or if they serve a useful purpose? Thanks for your help Andrew

mmm... you could copy them to somewhere else on the drive; reboot and verify the system is OK. If it is... then I guess you can safely dump them? Frequently I find similar items on systems at work - following auto-updates via main admin routines, and they get dumped without any problems... "Usually" anything in the tmep folder is meant to be just that; temp. Most well behaved programmes etc. clean out their traces when they've completed their service etc... A few tend to be less so inclined, leave junk etc. behind, and you have to clean up after them...

Hi trvlr thanks for the information. I guess my concern is that although they are installed from the temp directory - suggesting they can be deleted, there may be some reference to them from the installed program. No msp = no reference = unstable program. It would maybe risky to assume that everyone writes well behaved software, I mean even Mircosoft has been know to take shortcuts sometimes! Pavesa

Then dump them into some spare folder for a week or two. If you get no problem they can go. I've never found anything in a temp folder that matters as long as you've done one good boot since you saw them. DerekW

I've just been looking at my hard disk to try and work out why I'm running out of space (it's a 160GB hdd) and I found that I have 35GB of *.msp files in the Windows/installer/ directory. I'd really like to know if I can delete these safely or not...? Thanks. cheers, mattg

Don't know. I gather they are for MS Jet Engine and are used for Access & Exchange. You'd be better off to raise a new thread for this. Chose Windows system on left, post at bottom of new white page and note the post number. DerekW