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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-31T17:02:35+00:00

I have an SSD as system drive (C:) and it’s a real lifesaver, however

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I have an SSD as system drive (C:) and it’s a real lifesaver, however the free space is a premium value here, so I wish to keep non essential files away from this drive.
One of the major disk ‘eater’ is the VisualStudio HelpLibrary used in Local Mode.
I have searched on the net, but with no luck, how to move this location (C:\programdata\Microsoft\HelpLibrary) to a different path on a normal hard drive (e.g. D:\HelpLibrary).
There is a way to do this with Visual Studio or we need to use some registry or config trick?

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    I have found the solution on this site.
    http://mshcmigrate.helpmvp.com/news/moveorresetyourvs2010helplibrary

    I write here the relevant part of that article.
    However I suggest to read it because there are numerous information on HelpLibrary settings

    1. Shutdown “Help Library Agent” tray application (of course, you can’t change anything with this running)
    2. Find the current path of the help library store looking at registry value “LocalStore=” in HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Help\V1.0\
    3. Go to that folder and Move everything to the desired location.
    4. Update the registry value “LocalStore=” in HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Help\V1.0\ with the new path.
    5. Open the file manifest\queryManifest.??.xml in notepad and rename all occurrences of the old help path to the new path.

    Tried and I was able to free up to 6GB of disk space on the SSD.

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