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How do I find and delete temporary internet files saved after Private Browsing?

  • 5 replies
  • 2 have this problem
  • 7 views
  • Last reply by McCoy

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I always use Private Browsing. While searching for something else, I found a bunch of files in ...\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Windows\Temporary Internet Files\Content.IE5\*. The files are mostly graphics and documents from web pages I visited. Why are they not deleted when Firefox is closed? How can I get rid of them? Are there other places I have to look for similar things?

I always use Private Browsing. While searching for something else, I found a bunch of files in ...\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Windows\Temporary Internet Files\Content.IE5\*. The files are mostly graphics and documents from web pages I visited. Why are they not deleted when Firefox is closed? How can I get rid of them? Are there other places I have to look for similar things?

All Replies (5)

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Those look to be Internet Explorer files. Look for Disk Cleanup on your system.

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Thanks for the replies, but I do not now, nor have I ever, used IE on this machine. McCoy's links were interesting (and I did know most of that), but the procedure for clearing the cache didn't work. The odd thing is that there are eight sub-directories and a file called container.dat. All eight directories have been written today, but files in them go back to the beginning of the year. Of 7435 Items, 2806 of them have a filename of favicon*.png. There are a couple are .pdf documents I was reading today online, a pile of zero-length 'redirect' files, assorted .jpg, .png, and .gif files, &c. None of them seem malicious, and I assume it's safe just to delete them, but how do I stop them from accumulating in the future?

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Hello again fwb,

Doing some more searching I found out that those files are not just created by IE, but also by MSN Explorer :

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/260897/how-to-delete-the-contents-of-the-temporary-internet-files-folder

More information in these search results .....