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We have a server 2008 r2 box with a 60gb c:\ partition that over time completely fills up. The culprit appears to be winsxs, which is a well documented issue without any resolution beyond microsoft jamming their fingers in their ears and repeating 'its not a real issue'. This is all accurate from an extremely narrow viewpoint, however explorer, symantec liveupdate, wsus, and a host of other applications that live on this machine disagree and refuse to operate properly.

Ive seen where people are displeased because winsxs takes a few more gig than it should, however this has literally filled the entire disk. Is this an artifact of wsus, or some other crazy behavior? Anyone know anything i can do to stop (and hopefully reverse) this usage? The other machine we have running 2k8r2 is doing just fine, so its not a general OS issue, that i can tell.

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You've probably already found this, but the description of the problem is well described here:

http://blogs.technet.com/b/askcore/archive/2008/09/17/what-is-the-winsxs-directory-in-windows-2008-and-windows-vista-and-why-is-it-so-large.aspx

That's the 'why' of it. As they say, the only way to reduce the size of this directory is to remove levels of Windows Update and Service Pack undo history. How to do that is described in a later blog post:

http://blogs.technet.com/b/joscon/archive/2010/06/12/where-is-vsp1cln-on-windows-2008.aspx

Which only covers Server 2008. R2 hasn't had a service-pack yet, so there isn't a tool released for it.

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ive read that and understand why its large, and it seems to be growing daily and thats the part i dont understand. based on that explanation it should only grow when things are installed, which isnt happening with any regularity. – Devnull Aug 4 '10 at 12:55
turns out that the event logs were filling up and auto-archiving. this combined with windirstat not indexing 'hidden' folders caused it to appear that a bunch of disk space should be available when it was in fact consumed. accepting this answer because you did answer my question, even if it wasnt the root of the issue. – Devnull Aug 13 '10 at 21:19
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