Well, it's time for another computer
experiment, where I try to do things you should absolutely not do to your own
computer. I'm ThioJoe, and in the past I've done stuff like deleting the System32 folder,
or deleting the Windows and AppData folder, stuff like that. But what about those
Program Files folders you've probably seen? There's actually more to it than just programs
you've installed, there's actually some important Windows files in there. So we're gonna
find out what happens if you delete them, while Windows is running, of course. That's
the fun part. And actually the result for this one was pretty hilarious. I was not
expecting it, so I think you'll like this. As always, I am doing this in
a virtual machine. So again, do not ever do this on your own computer. As
you'll see, it basically will ruin it. Alright, so quickly for some context, first let's take a
look at what's actually in these folders. Now, I'm running Windows 11 Pro, and of course
I've enabled Hidden Files and Folders, as well as System Files and
Folders, so we can see everything. So the three folders we're dealing with
today are the "Program Files" folder, the "Program Files (x86)" folder,
which has 32-bit files in there, and then the "ProgramData" folder, which is
related. I'll explain that in a second. So first looking in the Program Files folder,
this is for a clean installation of Windows. If you have other stuff installed, obviously it's
gonna mess with those too. But as you can see, it's mostly just some pre-installed
Windows software here. Shouldn't be too critical for most of these,
like Windows Mail, Media Player, Photo Viewer. I don't think this is
gonna destroy Windows deleting those. But there are some other folders that
seem like they might cause some issues, like Windows Defender, Windows PowerShell,
the Common Files folder, which has stuff like Microsoft Shared and System. These seem
kind of important. Also WindowsApps, I can't even look into this one normally, so I had to
actually set myself as the owner for these files, and it looks like there's some install packages or
manifests for those pre-installed files in here. Everything from Bing News to
Sticky Notes, Windows Terminal, and Notepad. One thing to note though is
I don't believe these are installed here, it's just some manifests and info about
the installation. Now if we go to the other Program Files x86 folder, you can see it's
a lot of the same stuff as the other one. We see Windows Mail again, Photo Viewer.
I guess these programs have both 64 and 32-bit stuff in there, so it's in
both folders. There also seems to be folders in here that look like they
might be important, like Common Files, as well as the Microsoft folder. Though this one
just seems to have Edge browser stuff, we'll see. And finally we can take a look at the ProgramData
folder, which isn't where programs are installed, but it just contains data that all users will be
using in relation to a program. So it's not the installation, it's maybe where settings
files and stuff will go that will apply to all users. Now several of these are empty,
like the SSH folder, the SoftwareDistribution. There's this "regid1991..." Folder which
just has one file. But there are some other interesting ones that I'm not 100% sure about.
USOShared and USOPrivate, seems to stand for "Updated Session Orchestrator", though these
are mostly empty. And then the Packages folder again. And then going back though, we have the
Microsoft folder, which seems to contain some important-looking folders that weren't in
the other ones, such as the Windows folder, I would think that's important, it has
stuff even like about the Start Menu. So I think if we delete this, it might
mess some stuff up with the Start Menu, we'll see. And then AppRepository,
this seems to be yet more packages. So let's actually get to the fun part.
So first I tried deleting Program Files. I tried just deleting it all at once. Of course,
that's not going to be that easy. Right away, the TrustedInstaller permissions
blocked it, which is basically the highest permission level on Windows. So I
figured let's go inside, see what we can delete in there individually. And it did let
me delete some when I selected all of them. I did try to delete the others individually, but
again, it wouldn't let me do that. To get access, I even tried setting myself as the owner for all
these files by changing the security permissions, but nope, that didn't work.
So this is turning out to be tougher than I expected. But finally,
I tried a tool called Advanced Run. This is a Nirsoft program, which can let me run
as elevated users. So I ran the Command Prompt as TrustedInstaller, which we saw before, and
then tried doing the command to delete "Common Files" just as a test. And boom, finally, it
just went away. So then I tried the command just on the entire Programs Files folder, and it
went through and it said some were access denied. But if we look inside, there's only a
couple folders left, so it was mostly successful. We have the Windows Defender
left. Not surprised, there's probably some extra protections for that folder, as well as
WindowsApps. We'll deal with that later. Now, before deleting more stuff, let's click around
Windows and see if anything is messed up yet. So the Start Menu seems to look
normal, Edge still opens up. The Microsoft Store does not open when I
click it in the taskbar. All right, that's one thing to note. And trying to run
stuff like the calculator from the Start Menu, also not working, interestingly. So now let's
take a crack at the Program Files x86 folder. Again, I'll just select it all and try and
delete it the old fashioned way. And again, it deletes a few, but not most of them.
So this time, again, I tried the "Take Ownership" thing on all folders, and it
does make me do a UAC prompt for every single one. But when I tried deleting Common
Files in here, it actually worked this time. So I was able to just delete that.
And then it seems like most of the other ones are working when I delete
it. Though the Microsoft folder won't, we can save that for later. So we're basically
just left with the Microsoft folder and the Windows Defender folder. In the Microsoft folder,
it's mostly Edge stuff, and it said it was in use. So I looked in the Task Manager, tried ending the
process in there, although it still wouldn't work. It still was in use, so I'll save that for
later. And then I'm also going to leave the Defender folder again. I think that probably
has extra permissions built in. So again, we can just kind of mess around with
Windows, see if anything has changed. And more stuff seems to be not working
in the Start Menu, like Notepad, Clock, Movies & TV. Although these might not have
worked before, I didn't actually check these. Even Terminal won't start. So while the
programs seem to be all broken, it seems like Windows itself is still fine and dandy. So
maybe deleting ProgramData will mess that up. And actually in ProgramData,
it let me delete a lot more than the others. There's only three
folders left. Microsoft, Packages, and USOShared. In Packages, I was able to
delete most inside. There's only a few left, probably because these are in use. So I ended
the Teams app, and then I could delete that one. I ended Terminal, but still can't. It says
it needs a System permission. And then in the Microsoft folder, by selecting all folders,
I could delete a decent amount more, there's only 11 folders left now. Though it seems like most
left here either need permission from System or are also in use. Going back to the Program Files
x86, I wanted to see again about the Edge folder. So I noticed it says in the Task Manager
that the web processes are used by the widgets. So I ended that process, and
now I could delete those Edge folders, and so that's the last of the Microsoft folder.
Then going back into Program Files, I was able to delete more of the WindowsApps folders, and seems
like just Terminal is not letting me do it still. So after deleting all of that, now let's
see if anything is broken in Windows. So the Start Menu actually opened
up for a second and looked empty, but then it immediately crashed. And
now it won't open, and nothing happens when I click it. And then I realized
actually the entire desktop is frozen. Clicking on nothing works, though not the entirety
of Windows is frozen. I was still able to bring up the Task Manager with the shortcut for
that. So I tried restarting explorer.exe, and that actually worked. I can now
even open up the Start Menu again, although the taskbar seems
to be missing some icons. But I want to see if we can break it even more.
So I'm going to try running the command prompt as the System user using Advanced Run again.
This still seems like it can't delete a lot, but a lot of it is because it's in use.
So it seems like we will with a little bit of effort. So to deal with the files that are
in use, I decided to use the PowerToys tools. That is a suite of tools published by Microsoft, and specifically one of them is called File
Locksmith, which will show you what files are being used by what programs, and then
lets you end those tasks. And interestingly, it still had no problem installing software,
although I realized that just went into the Program Files folder that we're trying to
delete, but we can leave that alone for now. So we can go back to the Search folder for
example, and File Locksmith is telling me that the Search Indexer is using that.
So I end the task, and now it actually does let me delete it. But then I realized
it's going to just keep creating it again, so I'll come back to that. I'll try some
more that are in use, like the AppRepository. It says it's in use by the "AppX" Service,
so I go into the list of services, stop that, and now I can delete that. There's some more in
use by the "State Repository Service", so again, stop that and delete it. I tried to finish off the
Packages folder, but it said they were in use and wouldn't tell me by what, and then I realized
it was just creating those other files again. So I decided to get kind of clever and
change the permissions of these folders, so that I as the user was able to access it
and delete it, but the system did not have permission to write to it, so it can't
recreate anything. So now it indeed was not recreating anything, although now the
indexer is messed up and Explorer is frozen. I guess because it can't index the files or
read what's in here. I don't know, something's messed up. And then the whole desktop just keeps
crashing, can't really do much here, it basically seems stuck. So obviously nothing is working
here, so I decided to do a forced reboot, and when it powers back on, there is no
background to the login screen or anything. It still lets me log in though, it just
took a little bit. But now once I get in, the Taskbar looks kind of weird. It's the old
Windows 10 Taskbar. There's nothing in the system tray. I try clicking on the Start Button, it just
says "Critical Error." There's not even an option to cancel, it just wants me to sign out, but let's
just move that dialog box out of the way for now. I try to open up Windows Explorer, maybe it's
working now, and I noticed something weird. This is not the Explorer I was using before,
this is the Windows 10 Explorer! So for some reason it seems like Windows reverted to the
Windows 10 Taskbar and the Windows 10 Explorer, because basically Windows 11 is built upon
Windows 10, has that still in the background, so I guess it kind of reverts
to it if something goes wrong. Going back into those folders, it does
look like it recreated a good amount of them again. But since the Search Indexer was
the thing that probably broke it last time, let's test and do a search. It seems to be doing
it, but no results are coming up, so it's probably still not working. So then I bring up the Task
Manager, and it's the Windows 10 Task Manager too! We've literally broken Windows so bad that
it downgraded itself to a previous version. So then I figured alright, well let's try
one more time to keep deleting stuff. But as soon as I right clicked, it just started
spinning the cursor, and nothing happened. Explorer froze and stopped responding.
Right click still works on the desktop, and I tried another Explorer window, maybe
it was a fluke, but nope, same thing. So because I can't even right click properly, I think we can officially declare this Windows
installation as ruined. But then I was thinking, I wonder if there's a way to actually recover
this and fix Windows, so let's see if we can do that. First I tried the trusty System
File Checker command, so the "sfc /scannow", and it did say it found some files that
were corrupted, and said it fixed them. And when I went to look at the log
file... but when I tried to hit edit, it wouldn't open in Notepad, because it
thought that it was not installed anymore, because the package manifest was gone.
Although I knew Notepad is still in System32, so I went in there and opened it through
that. So looking through the log file, it seems like there's a bunch of lines
talking about repairing files in all the folders we messed with, like ProgramData, Program
Files, you can see it's repairing all of these. So I decided alright, let's restart, see what
happened. But still no background for the login, the Taskbar still is messed up, still can't right
click in ProgramData, still messed up. So then I try a command called DISM, this often goes hand
in hand with the System File Checker. Basically, it makes sure that the files that System
File Checker are using are correct. So I ran that, but that seems to get
frozen at just 60% or so. So I closed that, ran System File Checker again, but this time it
said there was a bunch of files that couldn't be repaired. Then I went back and forth
trying the DISM and sfc again a couple times, and I restarted one last time, but it
doesn't seem to have any improvement. It's still all messed up, I can't even right click
on other folders that we didn't touch in here, like the Windows directory. So it's not just
the ones we messed with. So the final idea I figured I'd try is since I messed with the
permissions, and that seems to really have been the last straw, there is a command to
reset the permissions of folders in Windows. And that is the "ICACLS", and I ran it for
all three of the folders. And it actually said that it succeeded on some of them,
and failed on the others. Though maybe the failed ones were ones that were already
fine. So yet again, I restart Windows, and oh wow, there is actually a
background to the login screen now, maybe we're on the right track.
The taskbar still isn't fixed, but I can actually now right click on stuff
in the Explorer again. But it still looks like the apps are missing too. So then
I run sfc again, and this time it says no integrity violations found, that's kind
of odd. I run DISM again, then sfc again. Both of them think it's all good. However,
it still obviously is messed up. For example, when I run the Start Menu, it still says critical
error, that sort of thing. So I am officially out of ideas on how to fix this, I'm going to declare
it ruined. So basically, even though Windows was able to keep running through all this,
it was not really usable by the end of it. But I still find it really funny that it
started just looking like Windows 10 again, I didn't expect that. Definitely the point
that really messed with it was when I was changing the permissions, which didn't allow
it to recreate the files that I was deleting. And I think that really tripped it up. But it's
really weird that even after running the System File Checker and DISM, which I thought would
fix permissions anyway, I thought it did that. And then I explicitly ran the fix permissions
command. Even though it improved it, it still didn't fix it completely. So
yeah, obviously don't do this. You'd probably have to do a clean install to fix it
for sure. So anyway, if you enjoyed this video, definitely give it a big thumbs up. And let
me know down in the comments what you thought, and if you have any ideas for stuff I should try
in a future video. If you want to keep watching, I'll put a couple of previous "What If"
videos here, like where I deleted System32, as well as the AppData folders. Those are
pretty fun as well. So you can just click on those right there. So thanks so much for
watching, and I'll see you in the next one.
There is a discussion on Hacker News, but feel free to comment here as well.