An orphan file is a file that no longer has a purpose. For example, when you uninstall an application, a few files that make up the application, or were generated by the application, may remain on your hard disk. These are orphan files since they serve no purpose without the application. In general, you can delete orphan files, but you should make sure that they truly are orphans because some files, especially DLLs, may be used by more than one application.
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