Yours is the most accurate advice I've seen on this subject. The Downloads directory contains the expendable junk.
One additional trick that can help to slow rampant system volume space consumption is to relocate %WinDir%SoftwareDistribution to another local drive with adequate space and use a Symbolic Link, e.g.

mklink /d c:WindowsSoftwareDistribution e:WindowsSoftwareDistribution

I use these steps to maximize space and tamp the rate of disk consumption on the sysvol of my Win 2008 R2 server:

1. Relocate the Windows paging file to another drive
2. Use Symbolic Links to relocate these directories:
c:WindowsTemp
c:WindowsSoftwareDistribution
c:WindowsLogsCBS

to another drive with ample storage.

My NAS has a 35 GB system volume partition and configuring it larger would waste quite a lot of space on my data volumes. This is an effective solution when you are cramped for space on your sysvol.

This seemed to work fine

Delete files Under C:WINDOWSSoftwareDistribution

Before your rename the folder you must stop the service.

Here is how:
Start>Run
type cmd and press enter
type net stop wuauserv and press enter
type rename c:windowsSoftwareDistribution softwaredistribution.oldand press enter
type net start wuauserv and press enter
type exit and press enter
Verify that the new software distribution folder created when you restart the update service is approxiamtely 1.5 MB in size (standard files). Restart the computer and del the folder if you have no issues.