Windows 7: I have empty folders in Win7 user\myname\appdata\local\

This is a repost because due to hardware failure, it was lost and I cannot reply to cancerous's post. I have 50 empty folders in my Windows 7 user\myname\appdata\local\ folder. I'm wondering if I can delete them?

Here is an answer from cancerous and my response (it was lost).

They are most likely temp directories.

Are they empty in byte size, or you can't see any files in there? If it's the latter, make sure Show hidden files and folders is turned on in your folder options through the control panel and then review them. If it's the former, then it should be fine to delete them, although I don't see much purpose to it.
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Yes, they are empty an do not contain files....show hiden files and folders is turned on. I won't delete them now but if they are just temp folders and more are added, I might reach some point where I will want to reduce the number of empty folders.

Thanks.

I have a dozen or so empty folder in the same location, so they are normal. If you right click on one of them, select Properties, you will see Size on Disk 0 Bytes so they don't use any space and are innocuous. You would gain nothing by deleting them and may in fact foul up the system. Windows creates dozens of empty folder in the system for its use if needed.

Thank you. I'll just leave them alone. If they were temp install files that were no longer necessary, I would delete those to get rid of the clutter, otherwise, I'll leave them there. Programs like CCleaner will usually delete the ones that are unnecessary.

You're welcome. Many of us (myself included) use and recommend CCleaner for cleaning temp files/folders.

If you Windows Live Mail, it creates an temp folder that ends up in Local rather than a temp location and is not automatically deleted. You can safely delete them.

Thank you. I just finished backing up then deleting the ones up to February so I just have 9, then opened Win Live Mail and it created 2 more...one for each e-mail account. I ran a scan with MS Security Essentials and it did not created a temp folder in there. I would think that MS would include this in disk cleanup where you could check the box if you wanted to clean these temps.

I don't think that they intentionally stored them there but no fix has been forthcoming.

Just joined - sevenforums is great!

The empty {xxxxxxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxxxxxxxxxx} folders in XYZ_user\AppData\Local folder were bugging me, since I just "resolved" an issue with HP OEM help causing vanilla Windows help not to work correctly. I thought they might be related.

I deleted the empty folders and waited to see if new ones popped up - they did. Not sure which application created them, I searched my C drive by date and found that
XYZ_user\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Windows Live Mail\oeconfig.xml
was modified within one minute of the XYZ_user\AppData\local folder creation date.

After deciphering the xml (some disturbing things - ads?... ads?) and looking at the
XYZ_user\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Windows Live Mail\WindowsLiveMail.log
I felt confident that WLM was the culprit, although not 100% certain. So, I deleted the MT folders and ran WLM again - sure enough new folders appeared.

It seems as the though WLM checks for updates every time I use it to read mail. A bit of over-kill if you ask me. Although it might only do it twice a day (720 minutes versus 1440 minutes). The WLM install folder also gets touched.

Anyway - I'm going to delete the MT folders - y'all can decide if that's best on your machines.

If MS doesn't fix this, I'll just use another eMail client. No big deal.

BTW - MT stands for empty

PS. since I mentioned the OEM help issue in this post (I know, it belongs in a different place - but I'm new and I'll figure out the best forum/post to put it in a bit) I thought I might as well put a short note in here.

After spending some time with HP support, they suggested this might resolve the issue - it did!

The following must be run in an elevated command prompt and
-the parameter OEMHelpCustomization following option /featurename: is case sensitive

dism /online /disable-feature /featurename:OEMHelpCustomization

Peace!

Well, now that I've used the tutorial to reinstate WinMail I can't go back and correct some of the information in my post. Minor things such as where I saw what. It's easy enough to find if you didn't uninstall WLE - search "Windows Live"

I do remember two files were involved

• short.xml
• oeconfig.xml

I incorrectly stated that WL Mail was the culprit.... that was only the initiator of WL setup. For some reason the process thought that my short.xml (referenced as config.xml in the log file) was out of date. There were also some WARNINGS in the log file referencing language (en in my case). I tried a few things first

• repairing Windows Live - control panel, programs and features, windows live essentials (after selecting you are presented with the option to uninstall or repair)
• changing Windows Live Language (in control panel) - downloaded German (Deutsch), then returned to English
  This left MORE stuff in my oeconfig file [de:] references
• installing / uninstalling Windows Live compoents - maybe one of those I didn't use held the key - but alas....
• adding a newsgroup inside of mail - again..... alas

Anyway, my hat is off to the good folks who spend the time writing accurate information and also building the tutorial sections.

I'l endeavor to take better notes so that my posts meet this forums high standards of excellence.

The ads I mentioned are probably related to Hotmail or Messenger - I never saw any upsell in Live Mail.

It's good to have WinMail back. There were some neat features in LiveMail that might have carried back over to the reinstated WinMail, namely safe senders - but I don't know if the same functionality is there - the remnants are there

• I can add a sender to it (right click inside an eMail msg)
• I can view the list in tools\junk E-mail options

but I don't yet know if this list overrides previous restriction settings such as display images. With an entry in the safe list - images were be displayed in LiveMail - we'll see if it really did carry back.

Microsoft has released an update to Windows Live Essentials and it seems to have fixed this issue.
I get no more empty folders in AppData\Local when accessing Windows Live Applications.


Edit: Guess I was wrong. Maybe too hopeful.