Can't delete folder

I am in real estate where I use pictures. I created folders for the various listings I have and placed pictures in each of them. After they close I usually delete the folders including the pics. Lately, some of the folders has become inaccessible so I cannot delete them or even access the to delete the pics. What has happened? I even tried Unlocker without success. I am the only user of this computer so I have administrative rights. I am using XP Home.

I await the brilliance of your insights!!!

 

OK This is the only one that might apply; "Cause 1: The file uses an ACL
You may not be able to delete a file if the file uses an Access Control List (ACL). To resolve this issue, change the permissions on the file. You may have to take ownership of the files to be able to change the permissions.

Administrators have the implicit ability to take ownership of any file even if they have not been explicitly granted any permission to the file. File owners have the implicit ability to modify file permissions even if they are not explicitly granted any permissions to the file. Therefore, you may have to take ownership of a file, give yourself permissions to delete the file, and then delete the file."

How do I take ownership of a file?

 

The only message I am getting is that access is being denied. I followed MA's suggestion and note that the folder's read only is checked and the subfolder's read only is checked in grey and can be unchecked but it makes no differencde in the result. No, I have not reinstalled anything lately. BTW, some of these subfolders can be accessed and/or deleted; others cannot,

 

There's a nice little program out there called Filemon that, when run, will display a real-time log of all the files that the processes running on your machine have open.

This would be useful in determining whether a background process has tied up the file/folders you want to delete. The log itself is a little hard to read as the processes open/close files faster than you can read, but you can save this to text, and then search it for the file/folder name in question.

 

Ctrl--Alt--Delete, and click on the Processes tab will do the same job.
Maximise the display, or widen the default smaller display, will also show the amount of RAM each process uses. Bazza

PS: click on the Mem Usage heading and you can sort to ascending, or descending amount of RAM used. Very handy.

You can also click on any other heading to go Up or Down, in that heading.
Quick and dirty method of checking what is going on in your PC. Baz

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No, Bazza, that doesn't do the same thing, I'm afraid. Filemon tells you, for example, that svchost.exe has c:\windows\system32\odbc16.dll open between 12:00 PM and 12:05 PM, msnmgr.exe has messenger.dll open from this time to this time, etc. I don't know of any details you can add on to the taskmanager that will give you this type of information.

 

In the end, booting to the recovery console, and migrating to the folder in question, then removing via:

rd /s foldername is the best option. Though this is the more PITA version.

 

Thanks, Mada_Milty.
I missed the distinction betweeen realtime and realtime log.
Bazza

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