Windows XP low disk space error

One thing that I've had to tackle lately which took some research was a "low disk space" error that kept popping up on an XP Pro machine on our network. The user only had about 10gigs of documents/images etc on his computer, but his 80 gig hard drive was almost completely full.

After some research I figured out that it was the offline synchronization folders which were taking up all that space. Seems that databases are created for the sync purposes and those databases were getting quite large.

To figure this out follow these steps:

click Tools
Folder Options
View tab
Select "View hidden..."
Uncheck "Hide protected Operating System files"

Go to the folder: C:/windows/CSC and check the file size of that folder... too big?

This is the folder that contains the databases for offline synchronization.

Re-initialize the database and sync process. When I did this, it simply recreated the databases and no data was lost... but it's always good to create a backup just in case.

Click on

Tools / Folder Options and the Offline Files tab

hold CTRL and Shift and click the Delete Files button, it will confirm that you want to re-initialize the offline folders. Click yes.

MS Has the link with more instructions here: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/230738

After doing this, I freed up about 50gigs of space on the hard drive, and created a happier user.

As always, do this at your own risk, this was my experience, but might be different from user to user, and OS to OS. If the computer is not using Offline Synchronization then this probably won't help.