desktop.ini

[bill]

I keep seeing desktop.ini files: a search shows that I have 96 of
these files. Most are in ...\Temporary Internet Files\Content.IE5
folders and the subfolders of these. (Each user has at least one
subfolder in \\Content.IE5; one user has 16 of these folders, all with
meaningless 8-character names.

Is it ok to delete most of these desktop.ini files?
(When I erase the contents of the temporary internet files, I get a
warning the desktop.ini is a system file)

Thanks

 

[Gary Smith]

I keep seeing desktop.ini files: a search shows that I have 96 of
these files. Most are in ...\Temporary Internet Files\Content.IE5
folders and the subfolders of these. (Each user has at least one
subfolder in \\Content.IE5; one user has 16 of these folders, all with
meaningless 8-character names.

Is it ok to delete most of these desktop.ini files?
(When I erase the contents of the temporary internet files, I get a
warning the desktop.ini is a system file)

You can delete them, but Windows will put most of them back sooner or
later. Desktop.ini contains information on the special hanling required
for a system folder, and if you delete the file, the folder will lose some
of it's "specialness". In the case of the TIF folder and its subfolders,
it's desktop.ini that tells Explorer to use the cache-view display which
makes of of the temporary files and cookies appear to be in the TIF folder
although they're all actually somewhere else and have different names.

If you really want to clean up your system, delete Content.IE5 and all of
its contents for each user. Nothing in there is essential.