Monthly Archives: January 2017

cab_XXXX Files in your C:\Windows\Temp Folder

You may have noticed the Windows TEMP folder filling up with cab_XXX files on systems, probably more servers than anything. It appears that makecab.exe is trying to zip CBS log files in the C:\Windows\Logs\CBS folder, these files can be rather large and for some reason it’s unable successfully complete the operation, so it creates this cab file instead… every 30 minutes.

The only solution i’ve been able to find is to run the following two commands to clean up the files, the second line will remove the CbsPersist files that makecab.exe is trying to compress:

cmd.exe /c del C:\Windows\Temp\*cab* /Q
cmd.exe /c del C:\Windows\Logs\CBS\*CbsPersist* /Q