I downloaded WinDirStat because I felt like my hard drive space was just disappearing. My hard drive capacity is 142GB. I bring this up because I only had about 5GB left to work with. I cleaned it up pretty well getting rid of a lot of old temp files and some other stuff. I now have about 40GB of free disk space. I've been reading the forums and everybody seems to be saying not to remove any files from winsxs. I feel like 13.5GB is a lot considering people think that their same folder being 4gb is a lot. is there any way at all that I can clean this up without breaking applications?

Hello and welcome to the Vista Forums!

I have got quite a lot of say! First and foremost, that size is incorrect! The Windows Side by Side configuration stores a lot of duplicate files, exactly the same. However, the other copies are only hard links to the first copy, and don't take up any additional space. Those first copies may not even be in there anyway, and may point to somewhere else again!

Hard links are used to link these folders. These are far more robust than shortcuts or symbolic links. They show as the full size in Windows Explorer or WinDirStat. My point is that your file size is not 12GB. Microsoft always quote 400MB of actual data taking up space as manifests, first files, etc. etc. Your folder is quite large, so perhaps you are more around the 600MB line.

You can get some more general information here: Demystifying the WinSxS directory in Windows XP, Vista and Server 2003/2008 - Aaron Tiensivu's Blog

Sadly, you cannot delete any of it, and it is very difficult to shrink. The best you can do is run vsp1cln from a Command Prompt to remove some pre-SP1 stuff. Note that you can now no longer uninstall SP1, although this shouldn't matter too much, and you cannot then get pre-SP1 hotfix corruption replacement files out of it either, although that should matter even less.

If you have any questions, do not hesitate to ask!

Richard