the winsxs is only an inventory of a lot of other folders. It in itself is very small. But it points mostely to the .dlls that you collect every time you install a program. And when you uninstall the program, the .dlls stay
With all due respect and not to be contrary ... this is innaccurate.
The winsxs folder is actually a component store and not a container for links to files. It IS a large folder and its size is not
fantom. The side-by-side system was developed to alleviate the 'dll hell' which was so common in earlier versions of
Windows..
On my system the 'size on disk' is 5.77 GB (6,197,186,560 bytes) & it contains 39,985 Files, 10,094 Folders. These are actual
Gbs, actual files and actual folders.
Much has been questioned and written about this folder but one of the most comprehensive explanations I have read was in a
post written by Joseph Conway (Senior Support Escalation Engineer - Microsoft Enterprise Platforms Support).
In part it reads:
"All of the components in the operating system are found in the WinSxS folder – in fact we call this location the component store. Each component has a unique name that includes the version, language, and processor architecture that it was built for. The WinSxS folder is the only location that the component is found on the system, all other instances of the files that you see on the system are “projected” by hard linking from the component store. Let me repeat that last point – there is only one instance (or full data copy) of each version of each file in the OS, and that instance is located in the WinSxS folder. So looked at from that perspective, the WinSxS folder is really the entirety of the whole OS, referred to as a "flat" in down-level operating systems. This also accounts for why you will no longer be prompted for media when running operations such as System File Checker (SFC), or when installing additional features and roles."
The comments were posted at >http://www.neowin.net/forum/topic/590216-large-winsxs-folder/page__st__15< . Scroll down to
post #25.
Many thanks to Mr. Conroy for explaining the mysteries of the WinSXS folder!
