Part of the Personal computing glossary:

On a computer's hard drive, an orphan file is a support file (such as a DLL file) that no longer serves a purpose because the "parent" application it is associated with has been moved or uninstalled. Orphan files can be deleted manually if the user is confident that the file is not being used by any other application.

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This was last updated in January 2006
Contributor(s): Ann Petty
Posted by: Margaret Rouse

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