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I am using Win 10 and have installed Gimp 2.10 on my D: drive as I have more room on that drive.

I wanted to open a large image file (over 35GB's), but was unsuccessful because the temp/swap files were being written by Gimp 2.10 to the C: drive and it ran out of room. Initially thought this was a Win 10 issue as the swap file is on the C: drive by default. No problem, I moved the swap file to the D: drive. This didn't solve the problem and, after some quick research, realised that Gimp 2.10 has its own temp/swap folder settings. Used those settings to use folders on the D: drive. Still didn't work. Checked the settings in the Gimp config files and they show the correct folders.

[scratches head] Why is Gimp still writing temp/swap files to the C: drive? I then opened the image again and checked that Gimp was writing to the C: drive. Then crashed the program (hard exit) to leave the temp files on the disk. Here's what I found. When opening the image Gimp 2.10 was writing the temp files to "AppData\Local\Microsoft\Windows\INetCache\gegl-0.4\swap"!

Checked this result a few times by monitoring the C: drive and the above directory. In each case opening the image in Gimp 2.10 caused a large temp file to be written to that directory (anywhere between 20GB and 36GB depending on how long I was willing to wait). So I can say 100% that Gimp 2.10 is writing temp files to that directory despite the custom folder settings (and my Win 10 swap file settings for that matter).

I suspect this is not an issue for most users as the image file will happily open if they have room on the C: drive and they will be none the wiser. For me, big problem as the image cannot be opened unless I can work out how to force Gimp 2.10 to use the D: drive for temp/swap files (i.e. use the custom folder settings).

P.S. Can't manually delete the "gegl-0.4\swap" directory because the "InetCache" directory is a hidden system folder (even if you have "show hidden files" selected in the Win 10 folder settings).

P.P.S. Can delete the "gegl-0.4\swap" directories using the command prompt ("rmdir /s" command) with the administrator option selected, but doesn't make any difference as the directories were re-created when I ran Gimp 2.10 and tried to open the image :-\

UPDATE: Tried setting a user environment variable in Win 10 (i.e. GIMP2_DIRECTORY = D:\Gimp 2) and then as a system environment variable. Neither made any difference. Didn't break Gimp either : - )

SECOND UPDATE: Having read the comments, I'll do a fresh standard install of GIMP to the D: drive and report back here afterwards (once I've tried to open a large image).

THIRD UPDATE: See my comments below in this thread.