There are a lot of misconceptions about the %WINDIR%\SoftwareDistribution folder, home to the Windows Update data files. This can be seen by the myriad of posts and comments found all over the internet. So here's the real deal about cleaning out the Windows Updates cache.

Note that Windows Update automatically cleans out the cached updates at a regular interval (depending on the age of the cache, etc). If you're running production servers, you usually don't have to manually clean out the cache, unless you have acute disk space trouble. But sometimes it may be necessary to accelerate the process, and that's when the methods of the article come into play.

Don't delete   ...