Thanks everyone. I did stay away from modifying the windows files. I was able to free up about 8 GB of space by processing photos, another ~20 GB of space by cleaning up the folders used by mostly by Lightroom and the iPhone, and finally another ~5-7 GB seemed to open up (I am not sure how or why) when I implemented most of the recommendations from OCZ (my SSD is a OCZ Agility 3) found here. The few recommendations I didn't follow included the disabling the disk defragmentor and I am not in ACHI mode. I have 3 HDDs and 1 SSD on my computer and I made sure that the SSD wasn't on the disk defragmentor schedule, only the HDDs and when I checked my computer isn't in ACHI mode, but I need to look into what that is and how to make the switch. But my SSD is now close to where I remember it originally being in terms of open space.

Next I am working on start up time as it used to be ~ 20 sec and is now ~55 sec. There are probably a lot of downloaded programs starting up in the background that I need to clean up. I am also evaluating potential upgrades. I've already checked and my 8 GB of RAM doesn't seem to be near its limits (~4-6 GB is usually "available," although "Cached" is ranging from 1 GB to 6 GB). The 4 cores of the Athlon 3.0 GHz Quad core all max out when converting RAW to JPG and routinely jump to ~60-70% while I am making adjustments to photos in Lightroom. But, on the other side, it only took an avg of 5.5-6 secs to process each photo from a 15 photo group when I timed it recently, so while I am tempted to upgrade my CPU, it may not be needed.

BTW, there are a couple of things driving this: 1) my SSD card at one point only had ~6 GB of available space; 2) my computer is 2.5 years old and I thought it was time to look at it, and 3) process times when making changes to photos in LR can be a little (couple of seconds delay) slow. I am thinking #3 is either the CPU, GPU, or the fact that I have been processing photos from my HDD recently because of the lack of space on my SDD. I think my HDD drive may enter sleep mode relatively often as I can sometimes here it start to spin when the changes are slow in LR.