Recently there was some news about problems that Windows 11 users have started to face. One of the problems that people have been talking about is the strange case of the empty folders created on a Windows 11 PC. These empty folders are created at random and are left as they are without the original process cleaning them up. As a result many Windows 11 users have hundreds if not thousands of empty folders located somewhere on their storage drives.
Some users are reporting that they spotted these empty folders in the C:\Windows\System32 folder, while others have seen them in their user profile folders. Whatever the case may be, we can clean them all using an open-source tool called Remove Empty Directories (RED).
RED is designed to seek and delete all sorts of empty folders from Windows. It was originally designed for older versions of Windows, but the developers have updated it to work with Windows 11 too. I think they experienced the same problem of excessive number of empty folders on Windows 11 too.
RED is a portable application but it requires .NET Framework 3.5 in order to work. Using it is also very easy. We can launch it, select a folder and click on the Scan button. It will find all the empty folders located under the selected folder. Once it has finished the scanning, you can click on the Delete folders button to delete all the empty folders that it has found.
From the settings of RED, we can choose the delete mode (move to the Recycle Bin or delete directly). We can also choose whether the folders that have files but those files are also empty should be detected. We can add folder names to avoid and folder names to always include in the scan results. There is also an option to add RED to the right-click context-menu of Windows File Explorer.
All in all, if your Windows PC has an infestation of empty folders, you can rely upon RED. It can find all the empty folder no matter where they are hiding, and eliminate them for you.
You can download Remove Empty Directories (RED) from https://www.jonasjohn.de/red.htm.