Safe to remove? - VC_Red, install.res, EULAs and globdata files appeard all of the sudden

[Mortis Angelus]

Hello!

First of all, not sure I post this in the correct subforum, so please move it if necessary.

 

I have 3 main drives in my system. My C-drive and two "games" drives where I have my steam, epic, EA-libraries etc.

 

All of the sudden today, I found the Games 1-drive filled with a bunch of random files (see below). A quick googling SUGGESTS that these are created by mistake by Windows and should end up in temp folder or in appdata folder, not on a random drive, but can sometimes do so. So based on that, it sounds like it should be fine to delete. But then again, I don't trust suggestions from random forums. Thus I'm here to get a second, third and fourth opinion.

I have just done a fresh-install of my system, so I would hate to screw something up by deleting these files.

 

EDIT: Also rather interesting that the dates of "Date modified" doe snot correlate to any recent dates, except those of my Steam and dropbox folders (for obvious reasons). How is this possible? These are drives that were wiped clean 3 weeks ago.

 

Thank you for your help!

 

[Alan G]

They are all part of MSFT Visual C++ Redistributable package.  For whatever reason they will install on all the hard drives in your system at least that what my experience has been and all five of my drives have those files but different dates of modification.  There is some "controversy" as to whether they are safe to delete (Google can be your friend).  Since all of them are quite small just leave them alone.

[Mortis Angelus]

51 minutes ago, Alan G said:

They are all part of MSFT Visual C++ Redistributable package.  For whatever reason they will install on all the hard drives in your system at least that what my experience has been and all five of my drives have those files but different dates of modification.  There is some "controversy" as to whether they are safe to delete (Google can be your friend).  Since all of them are quite small just leave them alone.

I could leave them, but they are in the root directory of that drive, which makes it impossible to not see whenever I need to access it.

 

And I cant find similar files anywhere else. And what's with the install-dates? As mentioned, I formatted these drives 3 weeks ago

 

[Alan G]

I'm running Windows 11 Pro and don't have any of those files on my NVME OS drive (at least they are not visible).  All three of my Data Drives have the files and they have the modification date year of 2007.  As I said, I don't particularly worry about these.  All my Data Drives contain folders so I rarely even see these files.  If you feel like you have to delete the files, at least make an image of your OS drive so that if something happens, you can get the "before deleting" OS drive back.  Personally, I would just leave it alone and pretend you don't see the files.