I have a forced windows update every month, these seem to leave copies of the installation binaries long after the update has been installed.
In the past, when short of c:\
disk space, I have deleted some of these, but on each occasion have lost licences as a result.
Is this just a coincidence? Should I be able to delete these binaries (a selection below) as they seem to be working copies of windows files?
For example the largest 8 files, in the largest installer cache folder, are very old versions of MSOffice files, for example here are the active versions for the totally obsolete version still being held in the installation cache
C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Office\Office14 MSACCESS.EXE 13,802,160 2018-02-17 17:15:24
C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Office\Office12 MSACCESS.EXE 9,896,112 2015-10-14 07:55:30
So ideally I'd like to delete all the content of the Managed folder, the latest subfolder [2018-07-06] is already 5 months old
C:\Windows\Installer\$PatchCache$\Managed 1.8GB "Managed": Sub-Folders=171, Files=2399
Folder summary:
C4286E3D5810BA7498039DF94A0411C6 2018-07-06 13:48:31 Latest
... 00004109110000000000000000F01FEC 2017-10-24 460 MB BiggestMSORES.DLL 72,521,600 2010-03-22 20:36:56
GROOVE.EXE 30,969,208 2010-03-25 10:25:22
EXCEL.EXE 20,753,760 2010-03-13 14:53:52
OART.DLL 20,516,712 2010-03-13 15:08:22
WWLIB.DLL 19,370,840 2010-03-27 08:38:44
MSO.DLL.x86 18,743,168 2010-03-23 11:03:04
XL12CNV.EXE 17,800,544 2010-03-13 00:50:14
MSACCESS.EXE 13,988,704 2010-03-01 05:09:1400002109030000000000000000F01FEC 2017-09-18 448 MB 2nd Biggest
00002109150000000000000000F01FEC 2016-07-07 265 MB 3rd Biggest
...
E85265FE62305C848AC6B3CA62CF51FD 2015-05-12 15:21:17 Oldest