A stubborn file that WILL NOT obey my command.

I highlight.

I press delete.

Computer thinks...

...

...

...

It says to me: Sorry dude, this program's in use. I know there aren't any other programs running besides winamp, but you might wanna check and make sure that it's not being used by anything else. Then, when you're sure it's not being used, come back and try to delete it, and we'll see how aggravated you can get.

Okay, the necessary information: It's a 500+ MB avi file. I'm running low on disc space, and want to delete it, but I can't. I know for a FACT that the file is not being used by any other program at all. I've looked around the MG site for the past 30 minutes or so looking for programs that can delete files no matter what error messages you may get, but I found nothing.

Can anyone enlighten me to some loophole in the Windows XP design that I can exploit to get around this troublesome situation, or perhaps post a link to a program that I can use to get rid of the file.

 

Gott............How about trying to delete it from Safe Mode??

 

Sweet holy lord, I forgot about safe mode...Unfortunately, I can't restart right now (downloading a program I've been waiting forever to get).

I'll try that. Thanks for the suggestion.

 

If that don't work, take a look at your Add/Remove programs list. See if there's anything in there that you have no idea what the heck it is. Maybe you'll notice something there. Ya never know what the heck they could have thrown into the AVI file.
Good luck Gott

 

If that doesn't work you can take a battery, solder on 2 wires, take your CPU and manually rewrite your hard drive and File System so that the file never existed according to windows...


Or use Safe Mode

 

It's in my weekly clean-up that I sift through the Add/Remove Programs to see if something's awry. Nothing usually slips past me.

What kind of battery?

 

I had the exact same problem. did all of the above and only the following worked, and still works.. This is a C&P from PROneTworks.

"The obnoxious bug in XP that causes Explorer to read the entire contents of broken AVI files before allowing any access to them is caused by bad behavior of shmedia.dll.

This problem manifests itself by causing Explorer to read the entire contents of an AVI file, regarless of its size or location any time the mouse pointer is hovered over it, or an attempt is made to access it in windows explorer. This causes 'permission denied' errors when trying to simply move, copy or delete these files as they cannot be changed while Explorer has an open handle on them.

This also causes a DoS situation where large AVI's are stored on remote shares and Explorer keeps reading the files from beginning to end each time they are accessed.

To correct this misbehavior in Windows XP, remove the following registry key.

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Cl
asses\CLSID\{87D62D94-71B3-4b9a-9489-5FE6850DC73E}\InProcServer32

This will prevent Explorer from loading shmedia.dll in response to file property queries on these files. This will not effect your ability to play files, get file attributes, or even view thumbnails. Say goodbye to all explorer.exe 100% CPU issues.

Just an extra note, if you do a "search" for this key it will not be found, look for it manually it is very easy to find. As always newbie or not, if you FUBAR your registry its your own fault. This fix does work, I use it and have applied it to many XP machines. Now go ahead and fix this royal pain in the a**!"

HTH

 

you know, it's funny how people exolt the virtues of XP as the best and greatest and most stable OS ever (see one of the recent threads on this subject), yet time and time again, I keep on reading about more bugs (especially the really annoying ones) that need unusual fixes on XP. I used to be a big fan of XP, and now I'm becoming a convert to W2K which seems to be less affected by all this crap.

 

Sweetness. It worked like a charm.

I knew that damn registry thing was gonna come in handy one of these days.