Deleting System Restore Files

Anyone who owns a laptop will understand how important it is to keep your drive from clutter. I was horrified to hear (read) that our of my 18GB Drive I was using 17.8GB, even though Windows, Documents and Setting, and Program Files all only added up to 5GB. After much poking round, I found the system folder System Restore. It was 12GB big! I set the SR size limit 2 1GB, and rebooted, to see if it would clean it out for me. It didn’t. I tried disabling system restore, which even popped up a nice friendly notice telling me that it would delete my SR points. It didn’t!
Anyway, my question is, If I manually delete the SR points, will it mess up system restore in the future, when (and if) I turn it back on?

Help is appreciated, as I want to install Age of Empires II 😉