by Michael S. Kaplan, published on 2005/09/15 03:31 -04:00, original URI: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/michkap/archive/2005/09/15/467010.aspx
In Regional and Language Options in Windows XP, in the middle tab, there are always two checkboxes:
Checking the top one will cause the following alert:
And then if you click the Apply button, you will see the files get installed.
If at a later time you uncheck the checkbox, you see the following alert:
And then if you click apply you will see files being removed. For the most part what you will see removed is just the font files; the keyboard DLL files are all very tiny and they are not removed.
There are nearly 10mb of fonts that get added and removed when you follow these steps, though.
If, on the other hand, you click on that second checkbox, you see a slightly different alert:
Wow, 230+ MB! Thanks for the warning, I don't think I would have wanted no warning for that one. I guess a YES/NO alert might have been nicer, all things considered.
Then at a later time, if you uncheck that checkbox, you get the following alert:
And that is a good thing, I wanted to get the space back there!
But it is funny, no removal dialog came up. And all the files lists from
Are the exact same size before and after. It is almost like nothing got removed.
I'll tell you a secret: nothing did.
And nothing has since 2001, when Windows XP first shipped. Regional and Language Options bends over backwards to remove 113 font files that take up not even 10mb, but does not raise a finger to remove the 6 files totalling 75 MB worth of fonts or the 85 files totalling over 80 MB of IME files. The registry keys needed to use the files go away, but the files remain. Talk about playing favorites!
I guess (given the dialog that comes up, which clearly does talk about removing the files) this could reasonably be considered a bug. But one that has been around for over half a decade, counting the XP Beta....
Luckily hard drive space is so cheap these days!
This post brought to you by "譃" (U+8b43, a Unified CJK ideograph)
# Manip on 15 Sep 2005 5:09 AM:
# Michael S. Kaplan on 15 Sep 2005 9:02 AM:
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