Removed temporary internet files still using space

Question

In the folder C:\Users\myUser\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Windows There is a folder named Temporary Internet Files.

I've deleted all 1,47GB of data from that folder, but Windows still claims that this empty folder contains 1,47GB of data.

How is this possible? How can I remove this 1,47GB of data?

Thanks in advance.

NOTE: I did delete them holding shift, so the trash-bin is empty.

I did reboot my machine after deleting the files.

Answer 1

This is a known issue. You have to run the delete temporary files 2 times (with Low and Medium IL) to get all data removed. When you run it the normal way, the cleanup runs with Medium IL, so the temp data from low IL are nor removed.

To clean all files, download this tool:

http://www.wintecnico.com/ficheros/CleanIETempFiles.zip

extract it and run it this way:

CleanIETempFiles.exe -t

This cleans all files.

Answer 2

I recently used the program WinDirStat to get a summary of disk usage on my Win 7 install.

It highlighted quite a large amount of space taken up with the Temp Internet Files ( and subfolders). However, when exploring that directory manually the size of files reported was far lower than the amount of space WinDirStat said was taken up. I just assumed that Windows was trying to be clever and hide them from me.

Anyway, I then deleted all the subdirectories one at a time and eventually gained back a large chunk of space. Might be worth a try.