Shoutbox

I've been cleaning up my computer and I found a big folder at this location:

C:\Documents and Settings\Administrator\Local Settings\Application Data\Microsoft\Messenger\<my hotmail address>\SharingMetadata

In there are folders named after some of my contacts' email addresses, some are over 300mb in size.

What is the purpose of the files in these folders and is there any way I can either minimize the size or is it safe to get rid of them all together?

Any help would be appreciated .

at most basic, it's for the sharing folder feature to work. Unless you compress the hard drive, I can't think of another way of reducing it's size unless you move it, zip it and delete it, but then again it could end up downloading it again or cause problems.

Okay, but what I don't get is that some contact addresses have huge folders while others have tiny ones. I've emptied all the sharing folders, so that shouldn't be contributing to the filesizes...

2 scenarios:

1) It varies from email address to email address as to what they send you. One could be a small video while another contact could have just sent a word document. All that is going to happen if you did delete them is that now you will be redownloading them from your contacts.

2) If all of them were empty in the first place then it has me baffled as to how it happened.

quote:

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Originally posted by MattyRid
2 scenarios:

1) It varies from email address to email address as to what they send you. One could be a small video while another contact could have just sent a word document. All that is going to happen if you did delete them is that now you will be redownloading them from your contacts.

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That's right, and the ones I have the most active sharing folders with are the largest, but, I can't be downloading again from them 'cause we all regularly empty our sharing folders

What I'm really after is whether it's safe to delete delete those files and folders? Will Messenger stop functioning, or will it just recreate them at need?

Just to be more specific, when I go from the SharingMetadata folder to this location

...\<contact's email address>\DFSR\Staging\CS{<loads of random numbers>}\ and in there are folders marked from 01 and upwards, sometimes reaching 99.

Those are the files/folders that are taking up so much space and those are the ones I'm wondering whether it is safe to remove.

Hey! I too have Sharingmetadata problem. It's over 1.4GB and since my partition C is very small, I need to know how to erase this folder. When I do it manualy it won't let me, saying "the disk is full protected".
Plz help me!

i have cleared all of my SharingMetadata folders and my messenger is running fine.
just make sure that you shut messenger down before the clean up...

It didn't work for me that way. I had to download a small program Unlocker and erase it.