Remove Cryptic Folders in XP

I've seen a lot of these weird, cryptic folders appearing on the root of my Windows XP machine for a while but never knew what to do with them.  I had data "Ghosted" over from a previous hard drive that had a mechanical failure, and most of these appeared after the recovery.  These are all seemingly random combinations of letters and numbers between 20 and 30 characters long on the root of my master hard drive (C:\).

Reading a few forums/technical documents gave me the impression that these are temporary directories and files that are left over from updates that have occurred in the past.  These should have been automatically removed, but they are often left behind.  Other users in my office have a couple of such folders laying around, and my computers at home have one or two as well, although my work machine has a couple dozen, which take up almost 3 GB of hard drive space!  As far as I can tell, these left over, benign files can and should be removed.

Attempting to delete any of these folders simply return security/access errors, so I tried to delete them using Windows Explorer in Safe Mode.  No luck.  I then tried using a del command in Safe Mode's Command Prompt.  No luck either.

The trick is to set Delete permissions for the administrator/user.  It may help to be in Safe Mode, but I was able to delete some without being in Safe Mode.  My account also has Administrative privileges, so that is more likely necessary.

The following are two methods for removing these data.  "Individually" contains the method that illustrates how to access the specific setting that is restricting these files/directories from being deleted.  "En masse" is a faster method to delete all of these folders at once.

Remove Individually:

•  Right click on a folder or a file and select Properties
• Navigate to the Security tab and click the Advanced button toward the bottom of the dialog box
• Highlight one entry at a time, starting with Administrators, and choose Edit (or just double click an entry to edit its permissions)
• Scroll down and check the box to Allow this entity Delete permissions.  Remove any Deny permissions if that happens to be selected, but these boxes should be blank.  Click OK once to return to the "Advanced Security Settings for [Folder Name]" dialog
• Repeat the previous two steps for teach additional entry in this list.  Others may include SYSTEM, CREATOR OWNER, Users [...], etc.
• Now deleting the folder or file should not return any errors and the data can be deleted normally

Remove En Masse:

• Select all cryptic folders.  Be sure not to include system/necessary program folders in this selection (see the graphic at the top of this article)
• Right click and select Properties to open the properties for all directories
• Click on the the Security tab.  You will be prompted with a Security warning
• When prompted, choose Yes to reset security permissions for all selected folders

• All permissions will now be reset to "Allow," specifically the Delete process

• Now deleting the folders or files should not return any errors and the data can be deleted normally

Additional resources:
 - How to take ownership of a file or a folder in Windows XP