ADMFILES.INI

ADM files are limited in which it only can adress registry settings where Some application need their settings stored somewhere, this is done in e.g. Ini files.

I would just leave the ADM files alone. Not worth cleaning it out vs the risk

What are you trying to do this--what issues do you have? Removing any of these files can cause more problems than solutions--they take up very little space so what is your goal here?

@Shaun/Lionel - the end goal is to minimize the sysvol file before upgrading to DFSR. We have over 45,000 GPOs and .ADM files takes 4MB per GPO (so right there, cleaning can be a significant relief space wise).

We have moved to admx files and central store and just curious what that admfiles.ini does.

And from what I know, .adm files are only used by GPO admins to create/edit policies, and should have NO effect on how group policies are prcessed on clients, no?

There is practically no documentation on the admfiles.ini files that I've come across.  My understanding is that they would list which .ADM files were used for settings in the particular GPO.  I have not come across any errors or side affects of deleting them after the .ADM files have been removed (haven't tried deleting them before the .ADM files were gone).

And yes, the .ADM (and .ADMX) files are just used during the editing of policies.  They don't have any effect on how GPOs are processed by clients.

45k GPOs? I think you need to do GPO cleanup, not ADM deletion.