Solved Windows 10 & 11 create tons of empty folders in System32

Running a search, I fell on this:
It's pure Chinese for me, ... so I'll ignore it ... (for the time being).

I have several hundred of these folders, the total size of the Local folder is 9MB. Weird. Windows seems to create a block of folders in one go (all with the same timestamp). Then a gap, then some more.

The-Hive said:

Has anyone deleted them? and was there any problems?

Click to expand...

I have deleted them earlier today and rebooted. No problems. I also disabled the Management ProvTool.exe task in Autorun64 from running at login with no issues so far.

Will post if anything comes up.

RogerOver said:

Running a search, I fell on this:

How provisioning works in Windows 10/11 - Configure Windows

Learn more about how provisioning package work on Windows client devices. A provisioning package (.ppkg) is a container for a collection of configuration settings.

docs.microsoft.com

It's pure Chinese for me, ... so I'll ignore it ... (for the time being).

Click to expand...

Yeah I ran across that too. I am not real sure it is the same thing. For instance no mention of provtool.exe and no trigger at user login mentioned.

This could be one for @Brink :) delete or not delete empty folders

And disable the management login task

The-Hive said:

Has anyone deleted them? and was there any problems?

Click to expand...

I did earlier today along with the two C*.tmp files in that folder and haven't had any problems yet and I already rebooted once after that.

The-Hive said:

Has anyone deleted them? and was there any problems?

Click to expand...

I deleted them all on Win 10 (2204 of them), and Windows 11 (180 of them).
I haven't seen any difference.

Good to hear no problems I guess a temporary is just that, temporary so it is not a permanent folder in Windows therefore can be deleted. I hope so because I am going to delete my 700 in a moment but not stop any tasks as I think they may be needed

A quick update, on this machine my second one, only 3 months old I had 1,200 + of these little buggers When I tried to delete them I was told they were locked so I used IObit unlocker and deleted them. Everything fine after reboot. I also created a shortcut to that folder to quickly check if any more appear as I didn't disable provtool.exe

Just another take on things ...


You have to decide what is safe to delete - that is the difficult decision

@barman58 good point Nigel I just worked on the fact that there were so many of them and temporary meant not permeant and not needed. I didn't think it was a good idea to delete or stop any .exe files

There is always an overhead to any File system - with the NTFS that most windows users use, an empty file or folder will take up 4KB (4096 Bytes) due to the sector size overhead, of course a 4KB file will also take up the one sector, but add another byte and it's then 8KB

If you have a lot of tiny files or empty folders it can soon eat up a lot of space, but then again these days most of us have a lot of space to waste, and the developers know it

I deleted all the folders, and...

I have also disabled the Logon task, and cleared the C:\Windows\System32\config\systemprofile\AppData\Local folder of the tw folders. We shall see...






This is on Windows 10. I'm now gonna do the same on Win 11...

OK, the Task is now disabled on Windows 11. If any weirdness arises, I'll post in this topic.
I bet this is one of those things the MS will turn back on, with every update.

On both Win 10 & 11, disabling Provisioning at Logon... does stop the creation of the TW folders.


Btw, I did make full OS image backups of Win 10 & Win 11 before doing this.

What actually are these tw-xxxxx.tmp files which application creates them?

The-Hive said:

What actually are these tw-xxxxx.tmp files which application creates them?

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They are created by a Task in Task Scheduler, as shown above in the pics.
The top red dot shows the task that creates the folders and the bottom red dot shows the navigation through the
Task Scheduler.

The top pic is Windows 10, and the bottom pic is Windows 11.


All you need to do is right click and choose: Disable ...for the task shown by the top red dot, to stop the creation of those folders at every logon.

Ghot said:

Somewhere there has to be at least some disk space used, to remember all the file names, and the locations of those files

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I seem to remember that any subfolder is just a file with the folder attribute set. The names of the files and folders located immediately in the non-root folder are just listed in the file. MS uses executable profile cache files, or whatever they call them, to avoid opening each folder file in the chain to find the exe file it wants to run.. I think. It has been quite awhile since I read any docs on those details. More than space used the inefficiency may be searching all those subfolders looking for stuff that won't be found. Just guessing.

Had a look, i have 47 of them, 40 of them show .tmp at the end and the others are for programs i have installed. The tmp. ones are empty but the others have things it in.
Tmp files are taking up exactly 0 bytes on my side.
The program folders have a whopping 6mb in them. Not sure how im gonna cope with the loss of this space!

As every file or Folder takes up a minimum of one 4096 Byte sector on an NTFS file system the absolute minimum for 40 Folders is 160 MB of disk space - not a lot in itself but it's a large pile of "nothing"

barman58 said:

As every file or Folder takes up a minimum of one 4096 Byte sector on an NTFS file system the absolute minimum for 40 Folders is 160 MB of disk space - not a lot in itself but it's a large pile of "nothing"

Click to expand...

Oooh good to know, But why doesn't it just show 160mb then instead of 0 bytes xD