Windows Vista ‘WER’ Report Queue Folder can become huge on Vista computers. “WER” is Windows Error Reporting and took more than 1 GB of disk space on my PC recently. I discovered that by accident when reviewing the list of fragmented files and found many 20 MB files with 300 fragments or more.
What to do about it: You can clear that through Vista’s “Disk Cleanup” (right click the drive icon in Explorer and select “Properties” and then “Tools”. This gave me back 15 GB of diskspace on my system drive.
Definitely worth checking from time to time if you have apps that crash a lot and use Windows Vista. Software developers and testers will likely have this situation!
WER can be turned off in the “Problem Reports and Solutions” applet in Control Panel.
Background Info on Microsoft technet: http://technet2.microsoft.com/WindowsVista/en/library/03a97dba-6b24-42c7-81f0-fb751f6e839d1033.mspx?mfr=true
February 10, 2009 at 20:10
thx, quite usefull
September 28, 2009 at 0:35
We have just had a Vista machine with a 111 GB partition, completely filled up with WER files. Windows gave the folder size as over 300Gb which is – strange – on a 111 Gb partition
After some hesitation we attempted to move them to a second partition, intending to see if the machine worked ok without them. This process never completed, so we stopped it and rebooted. The machine still believed it was full, so I renamed the containing folder. It booted ok, so I deleted them, but vistarrgh believed the disk was still full. After a 4 hour chkdsk 24gb space was recovered, but the rest is unaccounted for
November 17, 2011 at 14:00
The folder is compressed and hence “Size” will be a lot more than “Size on disk” in the properties dialog.
Magnus
November 10, 2010 at 16:02
Good post!