Windows 10 and 11 are creating hundreds of empty folders in the System Profile folder with a .tmp extension. The creation of these empty folders was first discovered in Windows 10 some time ago and, apparently, the behavior has been carried over to Windows 11. According to German blogger Günter Born, the temporary folders are being created by the Provisioning Package Runtime Processing tool. Word is that these .tmp folders can be safely deleted without any negative effects.
The empty folder names all start with tw and end with the .tmp file extension and can be found by navigating to the following location: C (system drive) > Windows > System32 > config > systemprofile > AppData > Local.
*Because you are accessing system files you might need to click a Continue button in a permissions window a couple of times but it should proceed okay.
NOTE: in order for the folders to be visible, the Show hidden files, folders and drives option needs to be enabled in File Explorer > Folder Options.
The folders are all empty so don’t take up much space on the drive but, because of the sheer quantity, you might want to delete them. On my two Windows 10 systems I found 437 and 542 of these empty folders and on my Windows 11 system there were 260. However, some users have reported numbers in the thousands.
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Hi Jim,
Bought a new system and threw Win11 on there beginning of the year. Decided to give this a check. 997 empty folders….looks like it continues on Win11.
JD
Yes JD, that was covered in the opening paragraph of the article. Thank you for confirming though, appreciated.