WinSXS folder over 10GB

[samumaster]

I have a Vista laptop and C drive has about 194GB free from 223GB. so im not running low or anything.
but about 4days ago there was 198gb free on disk and the size of the winsxs folder was about 10gb. i havent installed anything in that time, and now its 194gb free on disk and i just checked my winsxs folders size and it was like 16gb. but like 5mins after that it was 10gb again (the free space on hard disk remained 194gb).

so, is there a way to reduce size of the folder, and why did the size grow/drop 6gb in 5mins?

 

[Cromewell]

The short of it (and it's not all that short...) is:

The only way to safely reduce the size of the WinSxS folder is to reduce the set of possible actions that the system can take – the easiest way to do that is to remove the packages that installed the components in the first place. This can be done by uninstalling superseded versions of packages that are on your system. Service Pack 1 contains a binary called VSP1CLN.EXE, a tool that will make the Service Pack package permanent (not removable) on your system, and remove the RTM versions of all superseded components. This can only be done because by making the Service Pack permanent we can guarantee that we won’t ever need the RTM versions.