Originally Posted By: tanstaafl.
Wouldn't the cached index be kept with the program?

Not likely with any semi recent program that is following the platform standards. The cache in this case would be user specific, and data that doesn't need to be backed up or migrated to different machines as part of your user profile. Thus on Windows, the "proper" place would be inside your user folder, likely C:\Users\<username>\AppData\Local\Calibre or similar. Local in this folder path indicates it's data that is not automatically propagated around if your computer is part of a Windows domain with profile roaming enabled.

Though not all programs follow this recommendation, so it's usually hard to generalize across much at all.