Hi... I know this article (http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/winservergen/thread/174f3f40-41fd-47f1-8fd8-3f11a642c96c ) was marked as resolved...but it's truly not!!! Can someone please provide some much needed answers or solution on what MICROSOFT plans on doing to resolve this issue. thanks... SJ

Hi Mia11691, The Winsxs folder it the component store in the operating system. All of the components are found here. In practice, nearly every file in the WinSxS directory is a “hard link” to the physical files elsewhere on the system-meaning that the files are not actually in this directory. For instance in the WinSxS there might be a file called advapi32.dll that takes up >700K however what’s being reported is a hard link to the actual file that lives in the Windows\System32, and it will be counted twice (or more) when simply looking at the individual directories from Windows Explorer.” That means, in reality it doesn’t actually consume as much disk space as it appears when using the built-in tools (DIR and Explorer) to measure disk space used, which is why the Winsxs folder can grow that big. In order to reduce the size of Winsxs folder, please try the methods below. 1. Uninstall unnecessary applications if possible 2. If your computer is running Windows Server 2008 SP1, please use Vsp1cln.exe tool to clean up the space. If your computer is running Windows Server 2008 SP2, please use Cmpcln.exe tool to clean up the space. (They are located under \%windir%\system32\.) To do this, please follow these steps: 1) Open an elevated command window 2) Type vsp1cln or cmpcln.exe 3) Type Y to start the cleanup process. *Note: After you use this cleanup tool, you will no longer be able to remove the Service Pack, should any problems occur. Make sure that the system is stable before using. This tool is a one-time use tool. Once it's used it will no longer work on the same installation. 3. Delete blobs.bin file and reboot the system. The blobs.bin file which is located at \Windows\winsxs\ManifestCache\blobs.bin is used as a caching mechanism for servicing operations that are set to happen against the system. The file will naturally grow and shrink in size as various servicing actions take place against the machine and are satisfied. It the file grows out of control, let’s say it occupies several GBs space. You can safely delete this file without any fear of it damaging anything on the server as this file is just for caching. The file will be recreated when you reboot the system. If deleting the file does not resolve the growth issue, set the permission of the file to deny everyone from writing to it. The stack will see a failure to write to this as a signal that it doesn’t need caching and it will move on servicing files. Regards, Karen JiThis posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights.

Hi ... I can't find Cmpcln.exe under "\%windir%\system32\" on all Server running Windows Server 2008 standard service pack 2. please help me. thank you very much. panumat

Yeah... he mistyped that...it's actually COMPCLN.exe... I ran into the same issue... but it doesn't really free up that much space... it's really a ridiculous solution... and Microsoft ought to be ashamed of themselves for this yet another 'cluster'... Their requirements for installation of W2K8 needs to be changed... SJ

Hi Karen, Our evidence shows that the space reported in the WinSXS directory is ACTUAL space being used, not phantom reported space. Evidence comes from looking at the size of a Server 2008 VM on a dynamically expanding VHD and the size of the VHD matching the size reported by Windows Explorer. So, unless someone can explain otherwise, that tells us that the size of data reported by Windows Explorer is accurate. Thanks, Steve

I know that digging up old posts is not the way to go BUT I cannot believe this issue is still unsolved! We are running into the same problem here. Winsxs Folder consumes 13GB of space already. ManifestCache folder contains one ..blogs.bin file (630MB). Did anybody solve this in the last 6 months?

Along with everyone else that made the mistake of installing and configuring Server 2008 based on MS recommendations I too have undersized the c partition. From reading other posts I don't know how you would ever figure out how much acerage the forever growing winsxs folder will need. I noticed in an earlier comment that as a result of deleting their blog.bin in the manifestcache folder the winsxs had went from 40GB to 10GB. My system has two blog.bin files, 6.0.6001.18000_001c50b5_blobs.bin and 6.0.6002.18005_001c11ba_blobs.bin. My question is; is it really OK to delete the blog.bin files and does it really make a difference? Has anyone else tried this with any success?

I have the same problem too. The problem is that I trusted microsoft, and even payed. So there is no solution. Just they don't care. (as I see you did NOT an update fixing this). I'm going to put 10 gb of waste on my new ssd. The system is 2 weeks old. Can't imagine wath happens after a year. Yes I'm a power user. Might use ssd for others but not for unthrustable microsoft programs.

Just to make sure there's at least one complaint per month for MSFT to ignore: I'm dual booting XP and 7 on a laptop with a 92 gig hard drive (100 gig in doubleplusgood ad speak). 7 has been installed for a year and a half, on a 44 gig partition, with very little use. WinSxS takes up 4.4 gigs of a 10.1 gig !!! windows folder. This is unsustainable. If I start using the thing ("Blob Eats Disk Space"--new horror movie) I'm gonna run out of partition in a big hurry. My points - "hard links" or squishy links or real files: it doesn't matter. If windows is perceiving the space as used, I cannot effing use it for something else. The manifest cache is using only 67 megabytes our of the 4.4 gigs, nothing, relatively speaking. I assume from other posts that it will grow wildly with more usage, more frequent updates. But deleting the damn thing every time I turn around is NOT A SOLUTION. You know, I was excited when Win7 delivered a much smaller install than did Vista. You might say that was a way, way premature excitation. HOW ABOUT A SOLUTION!

Hi all I'm not able to offer anything helpful here, but am suffering the same problem.... 17.8GB file blob.bin in C:\Windows\winsxs\ManifestCache. I can't delete it and am not sure from my research whether I should. I actually bought an external HD to give me more space. The constant memory low warnings are really grating, espeicially as I've cleaned, defragged, deleted, sorted only to find the file using he space is due to a MS "system" file beyond my control. IMO they should sort this. An efficient OS should not include disc eaters that 90% of users will not be able to sort out out without recourse to hours of research. This 90% incudes me! Agree with above post - SOLUTION NEEDED MS. Thanks

Hi! I´m trying to reduce the "winsxs" folder space but the methods that you say is not working for my windows server 2008 SP1. When I try to execute Vsp1cln.exe tool to clean up the space, I get the error message that the command it isn´t recognizes as an internal or external command executable. And I look for the file that should be located under \%windir%\system32\, but is not there. Can you help me with this problem? Thanks in advance. Jessi

Disks are cheaper than ever, if the folder is that much concern, get a bigger disk My MVP is for the Windows Desktop Experience, i.e. Windows XP, Vista and Windows 7 IT Remote Assistance is available for a fee. I am best with C++ and I am learning C# using Visual Studio 2010 Developer | Windows IT | Chess | Economics | Hardcore Games | Vegan Advocate | PC Reviews

First time post here. I'm seeing the same issue here. Of 11GB total being used on the system drive, the WINSXS folder is reporting 8GB. The only thing installed on this server is Windows 2008 R2, SP 1, and any Microsoft security patches recomended. All this "undo" and "rollback" functionality is GREAT, but why does Microsoft force you to store it on the system drive? Shouldn't system admins and other profesionals get some say as to how much protection we want/need? At some point shouldn't we rely on our backups, or in a virtual invironment, snapshots, to rollback changes? In the latest release of Windows server, we are alowed to install in a console mode and have no GUI at all. There are a bunch of reasons you might want to do this, but isn't one of them to reduce your overhead and OS footprint? It would seem to me that this is a step in the wrong direction. I have seen the answer, "Disks are cheap, buy a bigger disk" before, that is a much too simplistic aproach for enterprise level systems. More and more, companies are turning to virtual servers as a regular way of rolling out new services. Microsoft themselves have a virtualizing solution. How is it that this excessive use of space is not only "OK" but it is mandatory? I run a VM farm with nearly 100 Windows 2003 servers and we are looking at migrating to Win 2008 R2. What happens when you multiply 100 servers by what ever size that the WINSXS becomes, then multiply that number by your regular backup schedule and soon you get a number that is so large it is no longer possible to move foward. All above questions are rhetorical, I'll be opening a new ticket with Microsoft shortly. Thanks for your time. Smiley

One suggestion to reduce the Window disk footprint is the disk cleanup tool. Look for it in the Accessories then System Tools If you clean up all of the restore points you can recover a vast amount of storage. My MVP is for the Windows Desktop Experience, i.e. Windows XP, Vista and Windows 7 IT Remote Assistance is available for a fee. I am best with C++ and I am learning C# using Visual Studio 2010 Developer | Windows IT | Chess | Economics | Hardcore Games | Vegan Advocate | PC Reviews

Of course I can also suggest a bigger HD My MVP is for the Windows Desktop Experience, i.e. Windows XP, Vista and Windows 7 IT Remote Assistance is available for a fee. I am best with C++ and I am learning C# using Visual Studio 2010 Developer | Windows IT | Chess | Economics | Hardcore Games | Vegan Advocate | PC Reviews

First post in here and I am posting because it's really driving me crazy to hear such things from (allegedly) MVP s of the company @ Vegan Fanatic "Disks are cheaper than ever, if the folder is that much concern, get a bigger disk" "Of course I can also suggest a bigger HD" I could start with a lot of suggestions too.. But I will start with the obvious answer : I DON'T WANT to buy a new hdd.. The hdd I have is more than adequate for my needs..Or would be, without the winsxs situation.. If you want to contribute to something except adding to the number of posts you have,stop telling people what the winsxs folder is for, or the reason tha it grows out of proportion and concentrate on actually DOING SOMETHING TO SOLVE THE PROBLEM, which by the way, microsoft knew that existed as of windows Vista. (and that goes for the other five-gold-medals-under-my-name mvp s in here)

I just took a look at my folder at its only 9.86 GB at the moment. Mind you I just installed Windows clean on a new disk. My old disk died so I had to replace it. Old disk was 500 GB, now I have 750 GB for what its worth. The winsxs folder is a system folder so it should not be tampered with. Can you post a complete list of all of the installed programs? My MVP is for the Windows Desktop Experience, i.e. Windows XP, Vista and Windows 7 IT Remote Assistance is available for a fee. Visit my IT site for information. I am best with C++ and I am learning C# using Visual Studio 2010. My page on Video Card Problems is now my most popular landing page. Developer | Windows IT | Chess | Economics | Hardcore Games | Vegan Advocate | PC Reviews

some of you guys are of pathetic help, why bother posting? disc cleanup? Are you serious? Did you seriously think we did not already try that? Move the folder? These folders are still required to be part of the system, moving it does not get rid of the fact its still part of the system; it wont work without it! Buy another hard drive? You seriously think that fixes the problem? Do you think causing downtime to replace an HDD because of unexplainable HDD growth is acceptable? Just because HDDs are cheaper, did you guys ever consider that the time to perform the backup/recovery (and not just limited to this) will require multiple times the amount of time it originally cost? Not even going to mention testing/verifying those backups... all due to unexplainable hard drive file growth. At minimum microsoft needs to release current documentation other than conflicting statements from their engineers (hard links? seriously...?) Rather than giving bandaids to what has/is a serious problem, why help in ignoring it? I just installed S2k8 R2 w/ absolutely no service packs or updates and the winsxs folder sits at 6gb. Regardless of whether or not its hardlinks/softlinks/junk, it eats up HDD space that prevents me from doing many things and does a hella lot more than just making things take longer and add costs/time. Not even repeating the lies of the microsoft s2k8 requirements (already posted above), and so much for the idea of trying to keep my backups to fit on a single disc, even a dual layer DVD is not big enough for this bare install. ps, none of the executables mentioned above exist on Server 2008 R2 and/or SP1.

Just adding my voice to crowd of frustrated users. We run a highly virtualized environment (Hyper-V) that was sized-out based on MS recommendations, with healthy padding for future growth. From what I understand of it, the idea behind winsxs is protecting users from themselves, when they install crappy apps or delete files. This may work fine for home users, but rolling this into the Server OS doesn't make any sense. Server admin that relies on stuff being hard linked in the winsxs folder to save his butt, instead of actually controlling his system or backing it up doesn't deserve to be an admin. So, now I'm stuck with a windows install that is twice the size it should be. Repeating some of what others have said: I don't care that you tell me the space isn't really used. If I can't put something else in that space, then the space is being used. "Buy a bigger HDD" is cop-out answer. In a hyper-v enterprise with hundreds of VM's, 10GB per VM is not trivial. Planning deployments based on MS sizing recommendations is pretty much worthless because of this. Supposing I do find a way to allocate more HDD space, how am I supposed to re-size the OS partitions on hundreds of production servers?

On my wokstation where I have several VMs I recently installed a larger HD so that I could install more software on a couple of them. I keep the VMs on a secondary hard disk and with the larger disk its not a big problem anymore. If your /windows folder is becoming that big I would like to see the software stack in use. I am working on a tool to create a list automaticlly, should be done soon. Windows MVP, paid Remote Assistance is available for XP, Vista and Windows 7. My page on Video Card Problems is now my most popular landing page. See my gaming site for game reviews etc. Developer | Windows IT | Chess | Economics | Hardcore Games | Vegan Advocate | PC Reviews