For example, I renamed the "Yahoo!" program folder to "Yahoo", opened Yahoo! Messenger, played with it a bit, closed the program, and throughout all of this, no new VirtualStore folder was created, not even after a reboot.Īlso, I'm not sure how safe it would be to delete everything all at once: what if a currently-installed program had an INI file in VirtualStore, and then it got deleted? Would the new INI file be identical to its predecessor? Or would the settings be lost? Et cetera. Unfortunately, however, I did not have the same results. I tried testing the VirtualStore system in the way you suggested, on the computer I described in my first post. Thanks for the reply DJJ123, and apologies that it's taken so long to get back to you about this. You should find that subfolders and files are recreated in VirtualStore as and when relevant actions and functions are triggered in the chosen application. Piriform: how about it? It'd probably just mean going through each folder in VirtualStore, seeing if it has a match in Program Files, and if not, marking it for deletion.Īs a test, simply open the VirtualStore folder in Windows Explorer and rename one of the subfolders relating to a particular application. So then I wondered, what if this were an option in CCleaner? Being a relatively inexperienced programmer, and a high school student to boot, I figure that whatever half-baked solution I would make and post to would probably be doomed to obscurity, when there's likely lots of other Vista users suffering from this. I've considered writing my own program that would delete the files, using AutoIT or something. Ditto for old Java runtimes and Adobe readers. And not only that, but it's still in the respective VirtualStore folders for the three other user accounts on the computer, meaning that there's about 800MB of orphaned junk sitting on the hard drive. So its program files take up 200MB on disk, and even though this was deleted from the Program Files, it's still in my VirtualStore folder. I'm guessing that OpenOffice 2.2's installer wasn't entirely Vista-compatible, since everything went in duplicate to VirtualStore. In one unfortunate example, I installed OpenOffice 2.2, and uninstalled it when 2.4 came out. The verdict seems to be that it's OK to delete these orphaned files. Microsoft knows about the issue, and they discuss it here: (see Scenario 4). This adds up fast when you install and uninstall lots of programs. The problem is that when you uninstall a program, its VirtualStore entires aren't necessarily deleted too. So, pretty smart idea on Microsoft's part, but sadly it's not that simple. There are two ways to see these files in Vista: ( a ) Go to C:\Users\Your_user_name\AppData\Local\VirtualStore and browse through it, or ( b ) Go to Program Files and click "Compatibility Files" on the Explorer toolbar. For security reasons, this is discouraged in Vista, so Vista will step in and silently save it to the user's "VirtualStore" folder instead, and retrieve it from there whenever the program needs it. Let's say that a program tries to store data, not program files, in its Program Files folder. But I think this suggestion is worth it!Īs some of you may know, one of the awesome features in Vista is the file and registry virtualization: I'll focus on the file virtualization here, since it can be a bit more prickly. So, apologies that one of my first posts here is a feature suggestion that probably looks pretty tactless.
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