Hey guys, I'm new to the sub! Hope all of you are well. I am running an LG gram and I ran into a really weird problem with my laptop recently. This isn't a support request. I wanted to document an unusual issue I investigated on Windows 11 25H2 in case anyone else has seen similar behavior or can explain the underlying mechanism. A few days ago I noticed something strange, my SSD had lost almost 58 GB of free space over the course of a few months, despite not installing anything large.

I expected to find a forgotten game or VM.

Instead, I ended up spending several days debugging one of the strangest Windows issues I've run into.

The culprit turned out to be:

C:\ProgramData\Microsoft\Windows\CapabilityAccessManager\

More specifically,

CapabilityAccessManager.db-wal

a SQLite write-ahead log (WAL) used by the Windows Capability Access Manager Service (camsvc).

At one point the WAL had grown to almost 58 GB.

What I tried

The obvious hardware checks all came back clean:

• SMART
• CHKDSK
• DISM
• SFC

No corruption.

Using WizTree, Sysinternals Handle, PowerShell, SQLite, and Event Viewer, I eventually traced the file back to camsvc.

After rebuilding the SQLite WAL in Safe Mode, I recovered roughly 58 GB of disk space.

At that point I thought the problem was solved.

It wasn't.

The interesting part

I started monitoring the WAL every 30 seconds with PowerShell.

Instead of remaining almost idle, it was continuously growing.

Example:

622 MB
623 MB
624 MB
625 MB
...
640 MB
641 MB
642 MB

roughly every 30 seconds.

So I started disabling Windows features one by one.

Some observations:

• Disabling Bluetooth caused WAL growth to stop temporarily.
• Disabling Camera and Microphone access reduced activity.
• The strongest correlation so far has been Location Services.

With Location Services enabled, the WAL grows continuously.

When I stop the Location Service, growth immediately stops and the timestamp freezes.

Restarting the service causes writes to resume.

Current hypothesis

I don't think this is an SSD issue.

I also don't think it's malware.

At this point my best hypothesis is that something is repeatedly triggering capability/privacy logging inside Windows, causing the SQLite WAL to accumulate writes much faster than expected.

I still don't know whether this is:

• a Windows bug,
• an OEM image issue,
• a driver interaction,
• or a specific combination of hardware and Windows services.

That's why i'm saying that I did not find the definitive root cause yet.

I'm curious to see if anyone else seen CapabilityAccessManager.db-wal grow into the hundreds of MBs or even GBs?

If you've seen similar behavior, I'd love to compare hardware, Windows version, and drivers to see if there's a common pattern.

DISCLAIMER: This post was written by me and edited with Grammarly. Thanks a lot for reading!