How do you clear .thumbnails folder without hanging Windows Explorer? Is there a recommended way to clear out the thumbnail data that I have in DCIM/.thumbnails folder?

It occupies about 50 MB and I want to clear it out but when I press Ctrl+A in Windows Explorer it stops responding. There are maybe 10,000 files in there. 

Is that enough to cause this problem where Explorer just hangs?

I read in another post here at AE that you're supposed to go to Settings, Applications, and then pick the Gallery app and tap Clear Cache button. 

I tried this and it didn't help. Also it said in the dialog that the size occupied is like 170 KB or so. So I don't think that's it. 

But this is on Android 2.2, just for the record, so maybe it doesn't work that way in this version.
You could use any file explorer directly on your Android device to do this. A good choice is e.g. ES File Explorer File Manager, which as a side-effect also enables you to directly access your PC from the Android device (accessing your Shared Folders via WiFi), and has many other nice features:


Start the app
Go to Settings &rarr; File Settings, and enable Show Hidden Files option
Navigate to the folder
long-press the folder name, and select "delete" from the pop-up menu
Confirm the deletion of folder and contents, if asked for
for "normal operations", you might want to disable Show Hidden Files again


It is pretty safe to delete the entire folder (instead of deleting all files separately). After all, with a new phone/sd card, the folder won't exist either. The app/service using the folder will simply re-create it if it does not (longer) exist.