I'm not an expert in this area, but I sent some inquiries and got this feedback on the questions on the PATH variable. Here is my summary of the answer I received from the developer:
- It may be possible for OpenCL to be removed if you're not using any OpenCL applications.
- You shouldn't remove/move/collapse the PATH variables.
Since I'm not an expert, here is exactly what was written by one of Intel's developers:
No, it is not safe for the customer to remove/move/collapse the entries in the PATH environmental variable. Applications Intel and non-Intel alike add their relative locations to the PATH variable and rely on that information, if this is changed or removed improperly it will break existing path references and cause failures on systems.
Applications regularly add their information to the PATH variable and as such it commonly grows to a very large size, however applications should do their own clean up on removal, OpenCL is a shared product so it may leave some entries behind.