Delete the "Optimize Start Menu Cache Files" task

Many of you are probably familiar with the fact that when a new user logs into a server in Windows, there will be a new task created in the Task Scheduler which is called "Optimize Start Menu Cache Files-{SID}" with the sid of the user.

I'm guessing these tasks have something to do with optimizing the start menu. This doesn't sound very important. Often these tasks are even disabled. On a server which is used by many people, the Task Scheduler can sometimes be filled up with many of these, and it can be annoying to scroll through them to find the tasks you are looking for.

Is there ever any harm done by deleting these tasks?

Solution 1:

The purpose of these tasks is to perform some maintenance on the start menu cache.

I have been routinely deleting these scheduled tasks on servers for years now with no issues. Because these are production servers, not workstations, they rarely have changes to the desktop environment, and few users log in, so there is no real benefit to optimizing the cache.

In most cases, a server won't have a lot of these, so there's little performance impact. Removing them is more a matter of keeping the task list clean and organized, and eliminating possible sources of errors, such as triggering account lockouts.

In the case of RDS servers, though, it's possible for hundreds or even thousands of these tasks to be created, which can make task management very difficult, and cause slow startup.

If you want to see if there will be any impact from removing the task, simply disable it for a while, then if you're satisfied there are no problems, you can delete it.

Note that these tasks can be recreated automatically, so if you have a lot of these, you may want to revisit it occasionally.