Temporary ASP.NET Files Are Not Deleted

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Yesterday afternoon, I discovered that there were 64,725 items (consuming 2.41 GB) in the C:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.50727\Temporary ASP.NET Files\root folder of my development VM for Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) 2007. Apparently, each time I do an IISRESET or recycle an application pool, a new set of temporary files is generated but the old set is not being deleted.

I don't recall ever encountering this problem in the past, which makes me suspect that it is related to the fact that I am now running Windows Server 2008. Also note that I run SharePoint in "least privileged mode" -- meaning the various service accounts used by SharePoint are not members of the local Administrators group.

Doing a random spot check of the files, I noticed that they are indeed owned by the various SharePoint service accounts (e.g. the identity of the app pool running the Web application itself, or the identity running the SSP app pool). However, I also confirmed that the corresponding service account has been granted Full Control on the containing folder -- and thus it seems like ASP.NET should have no problem deleting these files.

Since this is only happening on my local development environment -- at least for the moment -- I'm not going to spend any more time investigating the issue at this point. In other words, I'll just "punt" it and create another script and add it to my Toolbox so I can periodically purge these files with minimal effort.

Here is my script (C:\NotBackedUp\Public\Toolbox\Scripts\Delete Temporary ASP.NET Files root folder.cmd), in case it might help anyone else out there with the same problem:

 @echo off

setlocal

set ROOT_FOLDER=%SystemRoot%\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.50727\Temporary ASP.NET Files\root

if not exist "%ROOT_FOLDER%" goto RootFolderDoesNotExist

echo Stopping IIS...
iisreset /stop

echo Removing Temporary ASP.NET Files root folder...
rmdir /Q /S "%SystemRoot%\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.50727\Temporary ASP.NET Files\root"

echo Starting IIS...
iisreset /start

exit

:RootFolderDoesNotExist
echo Root folder does not exist: "%ROOT_FOLDER%"
pause

Now all I need to do is periodically right-click this script, click Run as administrator, wait for the files to be purged, and then get back to whatever I was doing before I noticed that I was running out of disk space ;-)

Note that I tried using %FrameworkDir% instead of %SystemRoot%\Microsoft.NET\Framework, but that doesn't work unless you run the script from an Administrator command prompt.