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That annoying c:windowsassembly folder

  • Article

If you are anything like me, you want to tear your hair out and smash your head on a concrete wall with embedded rusty nails everytime you need to use Explorer (and any file-open dialog box) on the c:\windows\assembly directory.

While I am still working with my therapist on these issues, I decided to be a bit more proactive and see how many system files I need to delete for me to be able to see the assembly directory properly in explorer. I decided to go about it in a systematic way and only stop after deleting boot.ini. Luckily, I didn’t get that far.

There is only one file that needs a'mucking.

Do the following:

1. In console, type "cd /d %windows%\assembly
2. Type: "attrib -r -h -s desktop.ini"
3. Type "ren desktop.ini desktop.bak"

Voila, explorer will allow you to go through the REAL directory structure.

Note that sometimes it's useful to just have it in the original view, such as when you are a masochist or if you just want to drag&drop assemblies and let the GAC figure out where they belong. For that, simply do step 3 in reverse (ren desktop.bak desktop.ini).

Hope you find that as helpful and as soothing as I did.

P.S. This will work for other folders as well, such as the c:\windows\fonts directory etc.

s

Comments

  • Anonymous
    October 02, 2005
    Thank you sir! Always wanted to do this.

  • Anonymous
    January 03, 2006
    Try this too:

    cd /d %windir%assembly
    attrib -r -h -s desktop.ini
    mkdir gacview
    move desktop.ini gacview
    attrib +s gacview
    attrib +r +h +s gacview/desktop.ini

    Keeps your old view around (just in case).

  • Anonymous
    August 02, 2006
    Your therapist needs to stop you from looking on your computer where you aren't supposed to look!  Curiosity killed the cat you know.

  • Anonymous
    October 25, 2006
    This may seem really stupid, but I was wondering why you would even want to use Explorer c:windowsassembly directory... Im just curious, and also, what IS this directory for?  Im researching everything c:windows (beginner tech) thanks!

  • Anonymous
    October 25, 2006
    The assembly folder contains .NET assemblies that are potentially shared accross applications. There are other benefits for putting assembleis there - search for "GAC .NET" for more information. The reason you want a classic explorer view on these is that the structure of these directories is kind of complex and the names of the dirs/files potentially long. This makes using a command prompt to handle files in there somewhat annoying in some cases.

  • Anonymous
    November 13, 2006
    Does it realy need to be so big. i have  my windows folder over 1.5 gig now this makes me feel bad on my smal computor. can i clean somethings out of there. it is 158 mb and the M.net folder is 127mb What is this fore..

  • Anonymous
    December 02, 2006
    Yeah I wish Mangomama, since mine is 456 MB (479,015,039 bytes). :(

  • Anonymous
    December 16, 2006
    Yeah i wish both Mangomama and Will.. since mine is 2,1 GB.. :( and the WINDOWSInstaller get close to 2GB too :( with the pagefile of 1,5 GB and the hibernation file 1 GB i just blew off 7 GB for 'nothing'. btw: anyone knows if it is safe to delete the file from WindowsInstaller ? Thanks

  • Anonymous
    January 12, 2007
    Re C:WINDOWSassembly Is the DreamweaverCtrls.dll file supposed to be in this folder so that Dreamweaver can work with ASP.NET I am having issues with DataGrid in Dreamweaver 8 while using ASP.NET 2.0

  • Anonymous
    February 05, 2007

  1. Open Regedit, browse to HKLMSoftwareMicrosoftFusion.
  2. Add a REG_DWORD value named 'DisableCacheViewer'; set it to 1
  3.             open an Explorer window and type in C:WINDOWSassemblyGAC_MSIL

  • Anonymous
    March 23, 2007
    If your are only curious of what is in the folder,use the IceSword.The size can be set in the way of resize cache.

  • Anonymous
    June 25, 2007
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    June 25, 2007
    On new HDs, 231 Megs is 0.07% of the hard drive space. That's less than one tenth of one percent. On laptops, that's 0.3% of the hard drive space. It's not a matter of amazing or not. There's some software that will just not work if you dont have it, period. Remove it, but expect that some software will not work. And dont feel too bad. On my machine it's 463Megs.

  • Anonymous
    July 10, 2007
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    July 14, 2007
    Why is this thing hidden.  I came across it doing a Rootkit scan, and I just about wet my pants when the screen filled up.  I was certain I my computer was enslaved by a spammer until I found this column. Thank you for these postings.

  • Anonymous
    August 20, 2007
    So, can somebody tell us is it safe enough to just compress the /assembly folder ??

  • Anonymous
    August 21, 2007
    This is not an OFFICIAL answer, but I dont think anything bad can happen if you use NTFS to compress the folder.

  • Anonymous
    December 17, 2007
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    January 24, 2008
    Try using ExplorerXP... (www.explorerxp.com) It enables you to view things in ALL folders... even "C:System Volume Information"! I am by no close or remote way related to this software. I'm just very happy using it

  • Anonymous
    February 11, 2008
    TILL NOW NO ONE HAS REPLIED IF IT IS SAFE TO DELETE THIS IDIOT c:windowsassembly folder.

  • Anonymous
    February 21, 2008
    I'm in the same boat, my C: drive is at 0kbs and my c:windowsassembley folder is 5.4 gbs, it was under 5gbs about 2months ago... really annoying as I managed to free up 1gb last night and now theres nothing... Please, if somebody can help with this issue, I'm sure many of us will sleep better! S

  • Anonymous
    February 22, 2008
    It is unsafe to delete this folder. You are better off moving your page file/some program files into your D drive. One example of how you can do that is to take large applications/games, uninstall them and reinistall them on a different drive - most applications will retain their settings. Do this at your own risk though.

  • Anonymous
    February 27, 2008
    I was very annoyed with bad exploring ability of the folder. There is no good way of searching assembly there. I wrote a tool here, http://gacbrowser.sourceforge.net/ Hope it will solve problem of searching assembly.  also, it removes assemblies with "traced reference problem". I would love to add "backup" option for removed assembly in future..

  • Anonymous
    April 02, 2008
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    April 08, 2008
    You can also map a drive directly to your GAC and then you'll be able to see the actual directory structure. Go into command prompt and type:  subst z: %windir%assemblygac I got this info from http://weblogs.asp.net/jkey/archive/2003/02/25/3006.aspx and am very thankful.

  • Anonymous
    May 29, 2008
    ^^That was easy!! Thanks Jelani!

  • Anonymous
    July 27, 2008
    Maybe the growing size of the assembly folder is because of the temp and tmp subfolders. BTW, assembly is compressed in my system and have no problem (168 MB, but 98.4 compressed). What about the Installer folder? Can be emptied? If a program needs the installer files, can I provide them when needed or the program will crash? Must I have the installers in this folder 'just in case'?

  • Anonymous
    August 14, 2008
    I just checked the file viewer in InfoFind (http://www.omnicognic.com/) and it displays the structure of [C:WINDOWSassembly] and even lets you quickly filter through it. Normally I just use InfoFind for Oracle and SQL Server Database Queries and Reports but it has a number of system utilities and a file viewer too.

  • Anonymous
    October 03, 2008
    Thanks Jelani that is def the easiest way to do it.

  • Anonymous
    November 01, 2008
    Regarding the SUBST command that Jelani suggested, I had to modify mine slightly. This may be because I'm running on x64 (Windows 2008) My command is subst z: %windir%assemblygac_msil

  • Anonymous
    November 15, 2008
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    December 27, 2008
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    March 06, 2009
    LOL, I just LOL on somebody thinking about visual basic program to bypass Explorer :D Get a real file manager and be done with it. (i.e.Total Commanede, Servan Salamnder, etc., etc.)

  • Anonymous
    March 19, 2009
    Mino, that's because you're a C++ Troll. Vb6 is as good as anything and you can do as much as any language. sometime slower that's true and something are harder to do (ex.: multi thread) by the way, I DID made a Vb6 program to show that assembly directory. in wasn't on purpose, I was doing a search file and directory program, and I notice that the directory count was higher then what windows/property show. I started to investigate and even applying all the trick said here, there is 2 directory that will NOT be showed... although my Vb6 program does it. smile...

  • Anonymous
    March 19, 2009
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    April 12, 2009
    As has been said before, the WINDOWS/assembly directory implements the .NET Global Assembly Cache: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Assembly_Cache It grows every time software is installed that brings along a shared assembly, similar to shared DLLs installed in other system directories. It may also grow every time that .NET compiles CIL code to native machine code and caches the compiled result (in the NativeImages* subdirectory). I assume that the NativeImages* subdirectory can be safely deleted (because they can be recreated from the GAC* directory contents), but have not tried this.

  • Anonymous
    May 08, 2009
    This didn't work for me (Win2K).

  • Anonymous
    September 26, 2009
    Try XYplorer (www.xyplorer.com) for direct display. XYplorer: best of the  best "Windows File Manager and Explorer Replacement" (...) XYplorer is a multi-tabbed dual pane file manager for Windows, featuring a powerful file search, a versatile preview, a highly customizable interface, and a large array of unique ways to efficiently automate frequently recurring tasks. It's extremely fast and light, it's innovative, and it's fun! (...)

  • Anonymous
    December 02, 2009
    if you really want to clean up your hard disk and don't know what you are doing, just use the disk cleanup in start>programs>accessories>system tools then run disk defrag

  • Anonymous
    December 05, 2009
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    January 05, 2010

  1. Open Regedit, browse to HKLMSoftwareMicrosoftFusion.
  2. Add a REG_DWORD value named 'DisableCacheViewer'; set it to 1
  3.             open an Explorer window and type in C:WINDOWSassemblyGAC_MSIL 3 days I was experiencing this error. Thank you very much

  • Anonymous
    April 06, 2010
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    May 08, 2010
       Hey, if ASSEMBLY file/folder keeps growing, you'll have to delete a microsoft office/accounting program named assembly something and have to live with whatever that harms, but windows says it is only 12 MB, but it is really 8 gigabytes in assembly files. I have been tearing my hair out since my dad had my computer for business and wondered where 8 gigabytes went, and lately my computer's disk space has been fluctuating when it idles so that bought my attention to this.     Also, I doubt that compressing this space will harm anything since an NTSC compression is only to compress partially used blocks of information on the hard drive so that the unused space is freed up on large files.     Although, compressing it only pushes the inevitable conclusion that this file/folder will always keep on growing until your drive is full if you have a microsoft office/accounting program that keeps updating.                                                - Lombo           ______      _                   good luck               jy1235689       ( ^._.^)     ||                                                      jy             / ____/-----IO|

  • Anonymous
    May 11, 2010
    Help! I'm clueless about what the window/assembly folder is, but it keeps growing in size. Mine is at 73.1 GB already. I keep running out of diskspace, and I"m tempted to delete this folder. If I do, will my internet explorer be in trouble? Hope someone can reply to me asap. C",) Ladylee06 C",)

  • Anonymous
    September 17, 2010
    Ladylee 73 GB seems alot to me, are you compiling global weather simulations on your machine or something?

  • Anonymous
    January 24, 2011
    Oh, man. That is awesome. As a primarily .net developer these days, this has always bugged me, and I finally got fed up today much the same way you did, and thought I'd google about. You could always get a real explorer window by opening windowsassemblygac_msil directly, but that only worked opening a new explorer window - browsing there always failed with some generic error. Not anymore! Amazing that it only took removing that one file; I'll have to remember that for other similarly annoying views I know exist. I'm pretty sure anyone with 50 or 70 gigs in their GAC is probably doing something wrong, though...? .net 2's about 900 megs, and .net 4's another 600, which is fairly big, but nothing like that. And I've only got another couple hundred megs of extra dlls in the user-modifiable parts of the gac, and that's where much of our compiled code ends up!

  • Anonymous
    January 24, 2011
    And then I learned what the NativeImages folders actually were, and felt silly. I guess having 70 gigs in those folders just means you have a ton of programs installed that were written in .net? That's a lot of programs, though. (Or really enormous ones.)

  • Anonymous
    June 29, 2011
    I need to move/copy 3 dll files to assembly folder on my windows 7 laptop...it just wont allow me so need help please. also on console i get access denied when trying to run commands for changing/modifying attrbibutes ....help please!!!!!!

  • Anonymous
    November 29, 2011
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    August 19, 2012
    ... or you can simply use total commander with checked: show hidden files

  • Anonymous
    December 16, 2013
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    December 16, 2013
    If you have variant.C drop me an email, as I need to test my cleaner, and you are in need of a cleaning!  Total wipe and reinstall is always your option, as the steps listed here, are NOT enough to rid your machine of this permanently!

  • Anonymous
    May 30, 2014
    To answer the OP and others question "is it safe to delete the windirassembly folder. The answer is categorically 'no' !! Amongst other things, it will stop all the MMC snap ins working. This is current up to Windows 2008 server. Go ahead and try it - I did (in desperation). Luckily I was able to robocopy the deleted files back from a near-identical server role (DFS server) and hope that the files locked open with transient / volatile data will be the same on each node!

  • Anonymous
    January 01, 2015
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    January 01, 2015
    Sorry for spamming but i was considering the the article advice but it doesnt seem applicable. Namely this

  1. In console, type "cd /d %windows%assembly
  2. Type: "attrib -r -h -s desktop.ini"
  3. Type "ren desktop.ini desktop.bak" I just want it back the way it was token lists etc

  • Anonymous
    January 01, 2015
    This came about through having win7 on one drive and win 8.1 on another. on win 7 assemblies is just empty. Causes issues with installing ati display drivers/c panel but everything works.. Followed some bad advice which didnt restore the default view. However when I booted over to to win 8.1 cli errors when running games and the assembly folder is full of gac 32 gac 64 gac util tmp etc. The fix recommended (a gacutil command) did not restore win 7 assembly and changed the view of assembly folder in win 8.1 both O.S now give mom and cli errors. Game runs on 7 same game wont run on 8 despite the command being used on win 7 Man am I in deep water.

  • Anonymous
    January 28, 2015
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    June 12, 2015
    You just need to type "C:Windowsassembly" to Chrome's address bar w/o quotes ^^

  • Anonymous
    July 09, 2015
    thanks for info .It realy helped a lot.

  • Anonymous
    October 14, 2015
    The comment has been removed