How to delete .cab files from Windows Temp folder and prevent them from regenerating

I recently noticed at work that my Windows 7 virtual machine’s C: drive was down to its last couple of gigabytes of free space. What’s up with that? I wondered. After doing a bit of poking around, I discovered that the Windows Temp folder was clogged with multiple .cab files, nearly 32 GB of them in this case. Not cool!

It seems that all of these files are related to Windows updates not installing correctly, or something along those lines. The solution given by Microsoft forum user 5kyFx is this:

1. Delete the .log files from %systemroot%\Logs\CBS (which prevents the .cab files from being regenerated)
2. Delete the .cab files from %temp% (which clears space on the drive)

In my case, this appears to have solved the problem.