Short Answer:
It's perfectly safe until you want to uninstall/reinstall/upgrade the applications, thats listed there. Even then the effects are minimal.
Long Answer:
When you install using Windows Installer, a copy of changed system info is usually
is placed in that \Installer folder so that if later you want to uninstall you can restore the original system info using the Add/Remove tool from the control panel.
If you delete that information, its likely a future uninstall will not be as simple (or probably as complete.)
It's a decision you can make, if space is a serious problem. Its a trade off like most other things..
Without those files, you can still remove an installed app's major files manually, and generally leave some traces of it in places like the registry, without damaging the system. Howevere over time (and lots and lots of installs/uninstalls) you do end up with a certain amount of registry bloat. The result is a small drop in performance when booting/starting a program
Technically Registries are supposed to be expecting to accumulate debris, so the effects should be minimal.
With major installs like service packs, the restore files can be very large.
There is no real manual way to remove an installed service pack (unless you re-install) but then again i dont think service pack files are even kept in the \installer folder.. so i guess you can ignore this last point.
What you should look at if you really want to clean up your harddisk is the built in windows "cleanmgr" (go to start>run> and type cleanmgr) and
CCleaner which is a freely available tool, and highly reccommended.
Cant remember if cleanmgr was available in windows 2000... you'll have to check on that.
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December 8th, 2005, 02:42 PM
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