Help!!!! Microsoft preloaded apps filling C drive with updates (Candy Crush, Hidden city mystery of shadows)

Question

I've got some end user machines in my company. Nothing spectacular. Dell Optiplex 3050, i5, 16RAM and 128GB HD, and running windows 10 Pro.

Lately their C drives have been filling up with pretty much no space left. In a couple of situations 100s of MB left and then I scurry in an attempt to reclaim some space.

After running Treesize I found out that Candy Crush and Hidden City Mystery of Shadows were filling up the C drive with updates. The specific location of these updates is the "C:\Program Files\WindowsApps" folder. An example of an update folder is this: C:\ProgramFiles\WindowsApps\king.com.CandyCrushSaga_1.1471.5.0_x86__kgqvnymyfvs32. Each update folder is between 100mb and 400mb. There are literally dozens, if not hundreds of these folders in that location. The 2 applications (CC and HCMoS) aren't even installed on the machines.

I've tried taking ownership of the Windows apps folder and deleting these unwanted updates but they seem to come right back. I did some research and tried a powershell fix and another a group policy fix and neither have helped. Anyone have any solution for this? Please please. This has been ruining my past few days because of a few machines going through this.

Answer 1

Hello @Lanre Mawudzro

Deleting the folders will allow still the programs to download updates (probably pre-loaded ads update for their applications).

My recommendation is to find the packages installed from that sources to completely remove them from all the users (even 1 user with it installed will allow to run the update). Try the next:

From Powershell as local Admin:

Check (find) the package names:  
Get-AppxPackage -allusers  | Select Name, PackageFullName  
(you can use *partialname* to filter, for example Get-AppxPackage -allusers *candy* | Select Name, PackageFullName  

Using the package name:

Get-AppxPackage -allusers  *partialname* | Remove-AppxPackage -allusers  

This should delete this applications and stop their services or processes to download updates.

Hope this helps with your query,

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Answer 2

I was able to use your recommendation to uninstall the Candy Crush Package. That did not, however, delete the already downloaded update files. Those files still remain in the C drive wasting useful space. Any recommendation on how to permanently delete them? I've included a screenshot of the remaining files in the C drive after the uninstall of the candy crush package.