How to Delete files locked in winXP

[TyRanT]

Originally Posted by Lucky

Funny, killing explorer in XP is what I have to do quite often nowadays (due to certain instability I've had since I got 96kB worth of bad sectors on my hd due to the heat this summer), and so far killing explorer hasn't crashed my system once. (I have to kill exploer and then restart it almost every time I start a non-exe file from explorer instead of dedicated application, so I do it tens of times a day).
In short - explorer is not a vital application in 32-bit windows. If killing explorer crashes your system - something with the system itself is wrong.

I guess you miss understand..... When i like you and anyone else ends task on Explorer.exe it also shuts down the Explorer shell and you have to restart your PC.....

[extent]

the few times I've had to kill the explorer shell I just run it again and it comes up, minus any system tray icons that were active at the time. In 98 you could usually get it back by just double clicking the then empty desktop, in 2k thankfully you can bring up the task manager any time and use it to run stuff. *shrug*

When you're having problems with your shell that was always one of the ways to kick start it again. Kill it from the task manager, click cancel when it asks you to shut down. a couple seconds later the shell kills itsself with an error and spawns a new shell.

[LeCKeY]

hehe TyRanT

I guess you miss understand..... When i like you and anyone else ends task on Explorer.exe it also shuts down the Explorer shell and you have to restart your PC.....

Try going to run after that and type in explorer relaunch it
Note on xp i close that peice of bloat ware all the time and reopen it srinks it size by 10megs sometimes

[MewEleven]

I don't use the Explorer shell anymore, I downloaded another shell called Blackbox. You can get Blackbox here: http://www.bb4win.org. You only need to tweak it a little bit so that you like it. Also, before I used the Blackbox shell, I separated Explorer shell and Explorer windows by going into Explorer and going to Tools>> Folder Options >> View Tab and checkmarking the box next to "Launch folders in separate process".

wow the amount of wrong info on this thread is mind boggling.

A common problem with windowsXP is that its too retard proof, you cannot delete files in use or files marked as important, it makes it really easy for viruses to make themselves undeleatable, and it also causes problems with accidents, most of the time a restart will unlock a file that is accidently locked (one that isnt an os file or a virus), if it doesnt, scandisk might, although it rarely does on NTFS, thats why i use FAT32, that and the fact it has less overhead.

Now about the posts other people made:

1. Cool idea for a program, I will love to get my hands on it. I havent tried the killing explorer thing yet though, didnt have a chance, are you refering to all locked explorer files or only avi?
2. Bison, that will not work, windows will NOT let you delete a locked file from cmd, it has been tried before, what you notice, is that by the time you find it in cmd it has already been determined to be an incomplete avi by explorer, and it released it (takes a few min but possible), it just doesnt lock it again for you since you arent clicking on it, another way to avoid it relocking though is to make a temp file of some sort, select it, and then ctrl select the file you want to delete, the main problem is when a file permanently locks not temporarily (the main types of locks are, temp lock, for a few min, common with avi; temp lock till restart, also common, happed because of a bug; permanent lock that allows certain software which uses certain microsoft upgrade protocols to replace or remove file, is used to protect OS files, a few viruses know how to use it; and permanent lock of a file or dir caused by a bug in the file system, much more common in NTFS then FAT32, and unlike with FAT where many programs can fix it, in NTFS it often stays until you reformat that partition, on a few occasions running scandisk or defragmenter will fix it, but thats unfortunately not very often)
3. Moric, that only applies to broken avi's not files in general, but, still, that seemed to work at first, although now it doesnt have any effect anymore, maybe the service pack messed with it or something, i dont know, it just know it doesnt do the trick anymore
4. Xinil, notepad doesnt have any special power, doing it that way might work for the same reason i explained why bison's system will work, you can use ANY program that invokes the standard windows open window
5. Darkterius, actually its the restart that clears them not the safe mode, if safe mode allows you to delete a file that was in use then either it was a virus that didnt get launched in safe mode (i seen those), or it is a temp lock occurance and regular restart would have done the trick.
6. Buttknuckles, notron sucks ass, it doesnt find as many viruses, and all its tools are neigh useless now, it just invokes the new built in applets to do stuff, in windows 9x those were norton based (anyone remembers when norton was bundled with windows), that is norton supplied the defragmenter and scandisk engines, but for the later versions of windows, like XP or 2K etc, its using engines developed by other companies, and to get an impoved engine you need to get the full version of these. Norton safe recycle bin is just a second recycle bin (the didnt even have it autoremove oldest files when you need space) which is practically useless, norton antivirus is one of the heaviest most inefficient peices of crap on the market, it slows down computers ALOT, your computer might be half speed or less with norton when the competition doesnt do that, not to mention that they all find viruses norton cant, in fact trend micro FREE scan at http://housecall.trendmicro.com/ is superior to norton antivirus... and as for ghost, it can be done with any other tool easily, like nero.
7. TyRanT I might be missing something but crashing the explorer shell is the main idea, the claim was that doing it will allow you to delete files marked as undeleatable to prevent stupid users from breaking their windows. And you dont have to restart your pc when that happens, you just have to click on new task and type explorer.
8. extent, you are entirely correct, btw just to elaborate, it comes up minus the tray icons, but the programs are still running, so if a program was minimized to tray, it will still be running, and if trying to open a new instance doesnt bring the old one up but just tell you its running or really does open a new instance, then you can use alt-ctrl-del and end tast to shut it down, dont worry end task just nicely tells it to shutdown, it doesnt force close it, so it should be able to save all the data (if it has autodata saving, for example download managers will keep track of what was downloaded and not loose anything, but an unsaved word doc might be lost)
9. LeCKeYm yep another person who is right.
10. MewEleven, I actually have to admit i dont know anything about that.. ill check it out, sounds nice though

[Shalist]

alrighty....I don't know anything about shells and .cmd, tweaking registry, or any programs that make windows psuedo-usable. I'm just another computer user who tries to take the millions of little 'bonus features' that windows has, and find way around them. I can't understand why anyone would try to 'fix windows,' since there are many, many far easier and less painful ways to win multiple nobel prizes and god's sincere admiration, out there...

---

1) Sometimes, 'cut/paste'ing it to the recycle bin, instead of just drag/dropping, will work

If not,

2) tweak your folder viewing options so that you can view/change file extensions just by renaming a file. Copy/paste the name of the bad file to some new text file's name, so that they're the exact same (txt file will even 'turn into' a .avi icon), then just copy(or cut)/paste your new ".avi" file over the bad file.

(ie, rename 'new document.txt' to 'Silent Mobius 23.avi'. Doesn't have to be a text file, it can be anything, even another .avi if you don't want to mess with file extensions. They just have to look the same to the computer. Since you're not deleting the file, only replacing it with an 'identical' (har har) one, the computer usually doesn't complain).

If that doesn't work, you might as well just put it on the list of things to do next time you reset. But if you've got a few minutes:

3) copy/paste the bad file to another folder (ie, put a copy of it on the desktop), then either copy(or cut)/paste the new version over the old. It should 'reset' the bad file, so that you can delete it w/o trouble. (And, if you cut/paste the new version over the old, just cancel the transfer 1/2 through and it should get rid of both new and old versions.)

---

the 3rd trick is great for 'refreshing' a file so that you can rename it, but if you're just trying to get rid of a file, there's really no reason to waste time on the copy/pasting of a 100+ meg file, when the computer can't distinguish between a 100 meg file and a 1k file anyways.

Both 2 and 3 virtually always work, while the 1st trick works perhaps 1/3 of the time. If nothing else, none of these are particularly time consuming, and if they don't work, just try them again some other time, and they usually will.

I don't have any stray win-locked files right now, and i've never done anything other than what's posted above, so enjoy all that free space.

impressive for a non specialist user...
All your methods are correct, as I have used all of them before successfully, the problem is that often they wount work either..

[LeCKeY]

You know me i am BACK :p ok yes i am right i usualy try to keep it in line but i fall off the path alot hehe now what taltamir is speaking of is WFP windows file protection and it can be shut up easly. h**p://vortex2050.dyndns.org:8080/ he has a patch to remove the protection many 3ed party aps do it but i hate them :) O yeah and if a file is being stubbern load up safe mode and boot it never fails :p

awesome... id have tried it but its only for winXP SP2 which is still beta, or win2003... but its about high time we got something like that

[LeCKeY]

taltamir why dont you look around more it is not just for sp2.... he only patched sp2 other people patched sp1a a while ago