FACEPALM: Is the amount of storage you have left on your PC suddenly a lot lower than it should be? Then you may be one of the people experiencing yet another bizarre Windows 11 bug, one that can gobble up more than 500GB of drive space.
The bug, which was spotted by Windows Latest, is related to Windows 11's Capability Access Manager, a system component tied to Microsoft's app permission controls. It manages access to privacy-sensitive features such as the camera, microphone, location, contacts, and screen capture, and records when apps request or use those capabilities.
The problem is not with the permission system itself so much as one of the files behind it: CapabilityAccessManager.db-wal, the write-ahead log for the Capability Access Manager database.
A WAL file can grow during normal use, but it's supposed to be merged or compacted back into the main database. In affected systems, the file keeps filling the system drive and then remains huge.
Some users have reported it growing to around 70GB to 200GB, while others say it has reached 500GB and sometimes even higher. One Reddit user said TreeSize showed the file taking up about 513GB.
