Windows and temp files

As anyone that knows me can appreciate I am not a fan of windows. For some time now there has been only ONE thing that windows can do that I can't really do properly in Linux and that is play games. In particular Linux is rarely capable of playing any of the MMORPGs that I like to play, so to that end on my desktop machine I keep a couple of partitions free and install windows on them. Generally I install windows on its own partition, one that I can just blow away and reinstall every few months when the seemingly inevitable corruption sets in, and another which just stores things like the games themselves. I recently had cause to burn a dvd from an image I had stored on another machine, but given I was playing a game at the time I thought I would simply copy it across to my storage partition and burn it. Unfortunately upon examination I discovered I only had 1.5 GB of space free on my storage partition and the dvd image was 4.5gb. I started to look at data I had stored on the partition under the hopes that I could find something to delete and thus make enough room to copy the image over. Now here I will digress a little and point out that I HATE how by default windows won't let you do anything irrevocable, by that I mean, in a default windows install its a 4 step operation to really delete a file. You start off saying, delete that, then it says are you sure, then it puts it in the trashbin and then you have to delete the trashbin, then there is the automatic system snapshots and other things that go on. The long and short of it is that windows very effectively protects from the normal user making a fuck up and thus from that perspective I guess its a good thing, the problem starts when the user isn't the normal user. In my case when I ask the OS to delete something I expect it to be delete, right then right there, I don't want to have to go through hoops to get it to do that. Why not have this inbuilt protection? We all make mistakes I hear some of you say, well thats true we do but this protection comes at a cost, space. You see by making sure that you arn't really deleting the files windows has to store copies of the things that you delete everywhere, in our typical example there is the copy of the file in the trashbin and in the system snapshot. Now while thats fine if you have a HEAP of space, in my case I actively USE the 1.5tb of space i have on my network and I am not keen on windows wasting a significant portion of the space I make available to it on protecting me from mistakes (in reality I can restore things that I accidently delete even with all these things turned off, its just a pain). Theres the background now to continue with my main story. Anyway there I was poring through the partition trying to find something to delete and I noticed an option in the properties section that starts a windows cleanup wizard and I thought "its been years since I tried a util like that maybe its actually decent by now", so I started it up. Immediately I was presented with some choices about what kind of files it should look for / delete and being very cautious I only ticked the option I thought to be the least important, the one called "temporary files". After marking it I clicked the wonderful "Next" button and the system started to whir. I waited for about 10 seconds and then I started to think it was a little odd, it shouldn't take that long to find and list the temporary files for me, I waited another 20 seconds and then it proudly finished. It was about then that i noticed the terrible truth, windows in all its wisdom had decided that a "temporary file" was rather then the generally accepted use of the term meaning "a file that is generated during the course of normal use by an application and deleted at the end of the applications running" was actually in fact "any file that wasn't registered as belonging to a program as registered by the master install application list. This meant that because the majority of information was things like backups of my cd collection, games that were installed before the latest reinstall of windows (which resides on another partition for this very reason) were considered "temporary" and the result? All of them were deleted. Thanks a fucking bunch windows.