Problems with Recycle Bin

Hi,

Minor but irritating issue. I have just completely removed Norton AV 2004 from my PC and moved to NOD32. As a part of the removal, after I'd used all the Symantec tools for NAV2004 & NAV2003, plus run Registry mechanic and manually deleted the folders Symantec left, I noticed that there was still an Nprotect folder in recycler, even though I had previously turned this off and emptied the protected recycle bin.

I got rid of the bulk of the contents left in Nprotect by deleting the various files in Explorer, with a view to then deleting the Nprotect folder. However, I still have three files left in Nprotect that have 0 bytes size, no extension after the "." and Explorer recognises just as files - their file names appear as: 00033147.; 00033150. and 00033181. They were all created at 14:55 on 29/11/2005.

I have tried moving and deleting them and changing their attributes, and I get messages like "Error deleting file or folder: Cannot delete file: cannot read from the source file or disk". I tried deleting them with Killbox, but it said that the files didn't appear to exist.

I was pointed at a Symantec site for emptying the recycle bin, where it said to reboot in safe mode, run "command" the do the following:

c:
cd\
cd recycler\nprotect
del *.*
cd ..
rd nprotect

I tried this in safe mode, but when it came to the delete files line, windows said

"c\recycler\nprotect\00033147 - The system cannot find the file specified"

It did this for each of the three "ghost" files.

When I then tried "rd nprotect" it said that the folder was not empty and refused.

I even tried the whole thing again, this time using the /s switch on the rd command to delete the whole tree but after the "are you sure?" when I typed "y" I got that "the system could not find the file...." error message for all three ghost files.

I even tried:

- opening the suspect files (no joy, system could not find them),

- creating a duplicate in notepad (yes, but original "ghost" still there, even after I deleted my duplicate

- renaming the duplicate file to be exactly the same name as the "ghost" by getting rid of the ".txt" extension to leave just the ".", but no joy there either

- renaming the "ghosts" (no joy, system could not find them)

- moving the "ghosts" (no joy, system could not find the files).

I'll be damned if I'm going to format my hard drive just to get rid of these three anomalies, but I can't belive that there's not a way. Anyone any bright ideas?

 

Have you tried to disable the NProtect Service? Do this:

(1) Start -> Run -> type in "services.msc" (without the quotes).
(2) Scroll down to NProtect Service; then right click on it, properties and then disable.
(3) Reboot your machine and remove the NProtect Folders.

Good Luck!

 

As I've completely removed NAV, I didn't think there would be any NAV services left to run.

I checked services.msc and there was no Nprotect running.

 

bump.