There’s no easy answer to that question. At some point, something else you installed needed those redistributables and they got installed. Sometimes, you don’t know that an application is installing one of these redistributables. So the question is: how tolerant are you have having something potentially break?

I do a lot of gaming and almost every game I install has a particular version of the redistributable it needs. I have the 32- and 64-bit instances of 2005, 2008, 2010, 2012, 2013, and 2015 on my PC. As long as you have turned on “Get updates from Microsoft Update”, if these ever update, then Windows Update will take care of that for you.

One thing you could do is open up the Control Panel and then go to “Uninstall a program”. Once there, you could sort the entries by the install date. These redistributables don’t change that often, so it’s a pretty safe bet that, if you don’t have anything else installed on the same day as the redistributable, you could delete that one. It’s not fool-proof since the redistributable could have been updated since you installed it.

HTH

Hi there!
My experience is, that these libraries are often installed with Visual Studio, or other specialized SW. Some application added those, because it was needed to perform some operation.

File sizes are usually unaccurate in MS Windows, so we can only estimate how large those libraries really are, but I think its not more than 1GB on my SSD.

I have to say I live hapilly with them, even if I do not use Visual studio anymore.
I think its not critical problem which you should be concerned about, you can even try to remove them as @jayinalaska recommends in answer above. Make backup (or restore point), before you attempt to do so. If free space is not problem, I would let them sit there. There was reason why they went to your PC.

See my installed programs on screenshot:

Simply leave them all installed, since these redistributables take up very little space. Some installed older programs might be particular about which specific version of a redistributable is actually installed, even though a later installed version is supposed to be compatible with the previously installed versions. You might encounter this issue with any installed yet much older programs after installing previous versions of redistributables.

If you do uninstall older versions of redistributables which are supposedly superseded by later versions, and if any installed program subsequently acts up or fails to properly start or fails to properly close, simply re-run the program’s installer in order to reinstall the specific version of the redistributable which the program expects. Why? Because bugs in later versions, which are “supposedly” backwards compatible, may have been introduced.

On a final note, security updates to the Windows kernel can also cause issues for older programs, regardless of whether or not you uninstalled any outdated yet superseded versions of redistributables. FYI, trying any compatibility settings for older programs generally do not work if the actual issue now resides in the Windows kernel.