in my windows folder

[ESPplayer7]

there is a bunch of folders with $ signs at the end, are these spyware or part of whats suppose to be in there?

[Rick]

They are the folders created by windows update

They are there so you can uninstall the updates at a later time

If your running nt/2k/xp they should look something like
$NtUninstallKnnnnnnnnn$
where nnnnnnn is the update number

If you need the disk space and your sure you won't need to uninstall the upadtes you can delete those folder