"$UPGRADE.~OS" dir has appeared at C:\ top level ??

A directory called ""$UPGRADE.~OS" has appeared under C:\ on my machine. I suspect this is due to windows preparing to upgrade me to win 10, although I have not installed the KBs that do that.

I see on the internet that folks have asked about this dir in the past, even 7 years ago (with no intelligent answers), so it must be something that windows creates when it is getting ready to do an upgrade.

So, my questions:

1. Why did this suddenly appear (2 days ago), at an hour that I was not doing updates?

2. What are the consequences if I delete this dir? (It is over 1GB.) For example, will windows at some future time just spend hours thrashing about to just recreate it?

Thanks.

--peter

Beyond automatically downloading, Win10 has actually been caught trying to install itself on Win7 systems unbidden and unannounced. It was a mistake, says MS, and has been corrected. You may be seeing the remnants of such an attempt.

paul1149 said:

Beyond automatically downloading, Win10 has actually been caught trying to install itself on Win7 systems unbidden and unannounced. It was a mistake, says MS, and has been corrected. You may be seeing the remnants of such an attempt.

Ok, this is embarrassing...

It turns out that I misread the date stamps of the dir and its files. Rather than a couple of days ago, it was a couple of days ago plus 7 months. So, my question is totally bogus -- this was leftover crud (still an MS bug, but an obvious one) from a failure to install a new system disk back then.

Uh, never mind...