Junk “.thmx” and “.xml” files in multiple folders

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For several months, Office has been leaving behind junk (as far as I’m concerned) files in multiple folders. I have attached a screen shot of a few of them in my Recycle Bin. Sometimes the filenames contain Chinese or Korean characters, and include “…colorschememappling.xml” or”…themedata.thmx”. It seems like Office used to clean up after itself, but now I seem to get dozens or more files every week. Is there some change in Office, or some setting, that is causing this? Any way to fix it?

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SGDerby wrote:

Is there some change in Office, or some setting, that is causing this? Any way to fix it?

These are metadata files created because the browser (Edge by your icons in the screenshot) cannot display the formatting created by an Office app such as Word and stores that format coding it can’t use in these separate files in a separate folder.
Don’t worry about them as they are harmless.
The clip ones were copied and pasted documents from the clipboard and themedata.thmx ones are for the theme coding for an Office document.

HTH, Dana:))

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Hi SGDerby:

According to Jay Freedman’s 11-Jun-2017 post in office generate auto file .xml and .thmx in the MS Answers forum these .xml and .thmx (Office Theme Document) files are normally created in subfolders in the hidden folder at %userprofile%\AppData\Local\Temp\msohtmlclip1, and as Dana noted in post # 2702699, they can be safely ignored.

I use MS Office 2019 C2R on a Win 10 machine and can confirm that files with these .xml and .thmx file extensions are created in subfolders in my hidden C:\Users\<myusername>\AppData\Local\Temp\msohtmlclip1\ folder as shown below. Note that I recently purged all my temporary folder a few days ago so all my older .xml and .thmx files would have been purged at the same time.

Just out of curiosity, are your  .xml and .thmx files being created in the expected location at C:\Users\<yourusername>\AppData\Local\Temp\msohtmlclip1\, or do you mean that they are being created in the same default folder where you normally save your Office files (e.g., C:\Users\<yourusername>\Documents\)?
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