Have you ever run into a situation where you wanted to delete a file, but Windows simply wouldn’t allow you to do it? Personally, these things happen to me all the time, especially when I was trying to delete the Autorun.inf which worked with MS32DLL.dll.vbs (a autorun virus)it said me that the program cannot be deleted or it is being used by other program. I even tried DOS to delete this even it is deleted if returned back again. So I found a better solution for this by passing through several steps.

The main reason behind this is that the explorer.exe process locks files that are in use, effectively preventing you from deleting them. Usually, these files should not be touched, but sometimes, situations arise when you really need to get rid of some troublesome ones.

Fortunately, there are a few easy solutions around this problem.

Solution #1: Kill explorer.exe

* Open a command prompt
* Navigate to the location where the locked file is
* Press CTRL-ALT-DEL, click on “task manager”, select the Processes tab
* Kill the explorer.exe process via the “End Process” button
* Go back to the command prompt and delete the file
* Bring up the task manager windows again
* Select file->new task
* Type explorer.exe in the “create new task” field
* Press OK.

Solution #2: Use The Windows Recovery Console

Just stick your Windows CD in your CD tray, boot on it, and at the “Welcome to Setup” screen, press “R“. Once the recovery console has started, navigate to the location of your locked file, and delete it.

Solution #3: Use unlocker

Unlocker is a very useful freeware that will allow you to unlock any files that are currently in use by Windows. You’ll know if this is happening if you are getting any of these messages when trying to delete a file:

* Cannot delete file: Access is denied
* There has been a sharing violation
* The source or destination file may be in use
* The file is in use by another program or user
* Make sure the disk is not full or write-protected and that the file is not currently in use

Unlocker will make things right again for you. I want to thank my friend Manish coz He provided me this software unknowingly from his CD-RW.

You’ll notice that right after installing the software, a new option named “unlocker” will appear when right clicking any files or folders in Windows Explorer. To unlock a locked file, just right click it, select unlocker, and the unlocker software will start. Then, click “unlock all” and close the software. Now that your file is unlocked, just delete it in Windows Explorer, as you always do. This is much simpler than solution #1 or #2, isn’t it? So try this.