Files: Desktop.ini and Thumbs.ini

A few months ago on My new 27" Mac I transferred Documents and Pictures from my Win 7 Computer by using a clean USB Stick. I'm also running Microsoft Office on the Mac. All documents and pictures transferred but I found one problem. Nearly every folder in my documents has a file "Black Box" with the letters in green "exec" and named "Desktop.ini". In the pictured folders , the same Black Box and named "Thumbs.db". I transferred hundreds of Documents and Pictures to the Mac, now I have about 100 of these black boxes.
1. What the heck are they?
2.Do I need them?
3. If I don't need them, how can I delete them? (and I hope it's not one by one, lol).

Edit: Title to read Files: Desktop.ini and Thumbs.db

You can safely delete all desktop.ini and thumbs.db files as they are only needed in a Windows environment. You may run into a permissions problem deleting them, however. If you do, post back and we can figure something out to get rid of them.

Thank you chscag for the reply. I just deleted some in the Documents Folder and Pictures Folder. Didn't need permission to delete. Looks like I'll be busy for a few hours deleting these folders. Again, Thank you.

You might be able to find an Automator workflow that will find all the files and zap them. Such a workflow would need careful handling though.

Thanks for the input KevinJS. It's going along faster then I thought it would deleting these files. I'm about a quarter of the way done now. I'll get the rest tomorrow, it's been a long day for me today.