Tom,
The XIP sidecar files were used in PM 4 to store tag/rating/color-class for formats that PM would not modify. This included movie files (MOV, AVI, MPG4, etc) as well as the Fuji RAW files (RAF). Now that we put all of our metadata into the XMP sidecar there is no need for the XIP sidecar files.
So I am updating PM to remove the XIP sidecar files when PM updates one of these files that has an old XIP file. This will cleanup your proliferation of XIP sidecar files for your Fuji camera. But you will need to "touch" the files to have the XIP sidecar file removed (e.g. make some metadata change).
However, if you plan on going backwards to PM 4.6 then you will lose any preference metadata (tag/rating/color-class and old non-rotatable crop) when the XIP sidecar file is removed.
We are looking at adding a preference to PM to NOT remove the XIP sidecar files to maintain backwards compatibility to PM 4.6. But if you just move forward with PM 5 then you should be fine.
We'll try to roll this out ASAP after some testing.
Regards,
--dennis