Safely delete "Uninstall" (or whatever they are) folders from Windows?

Factual Questions
1

In mu Windows XP, SP3 folder, there are about 160 goofy folders, each with many files in them, that are taking a lot of space. I think these are formed when something is deleted, but can’t remember now (I plead old age). These folders look something like: NtUninstallK<B932823-v3

Almost all are dated several months or more ago. Can I safely delete these?

I expect some will come back, but I would like to clean them out from time to time.

I have plenty of disk space, but when I backup, or run antivirus or antispyware programs, some cleaning programs or other things, they go through all these, wasting a lot of time.

I suppose I can send them to the recycle bin and keep them a while to see what happens, but it would be nice to know that I can just delete them with a Shift/Delete and send them into space.

Also, I find that I cannot highlight more than one at a time, so would have to delete them one by one, unless there is an easier way to do that. I thought I could find and delete a lot of files with CCleaner, but now I don’t seem to be able to do that. Am I missing something there?

2

yes you can, hold down shift to select all of them

3

One of those folders is created every time a Windows update is applied. The folder contains the original files that got replaced by the update, just in case something goes wrong and you need to uninstall the update. It should be safe to nuke uninstall folders that are more than a few months old.

4

Oddly enough, this does not work. Some that I tried gave me the message that they cannot be deleted as some other program is using them. Strange.

Neither does holding down the CTRL key and clicking on more than one work either.

Deleting 160 one by one is more than I want to undertake. Which is why I inquired about CCleaner. I am sure that once I used that for a big bunch of files, but now I can’tseem able to figure out how to do it, alas.

5

In CCleaner, under the “Cleaner” options there’s two tabs, Windows and Applications.

If you scroll down to the very last category under the Windows tabs - called Advanced - there’s a checkbox for “Hotfix Uninstallers.” That should be the one you want.

6

restart your computer in safe mode and try again

7

Thanks, ZipperJJ and]ChrisBooth, both excellent suggestions. I’ll try Safe Mode first, and if that does not work, off to CCleaner for that suggestion.