I am absolutely at a loss on this one, if anyone has any insight I'd greatly appreciate it.

Here is the situation - A user on our network at work here is having problems deleting folders from both their local machine as well as their networked locations. If the user creates just 1 folder named "test" for example, they can delete "test" with no problem. However, if they create a folder named "test" and inside of that folder, create another subfolder named "test2", Windows will allow them to delete "test2" fine, but when they back out and try and delete the parent folder "test" afterward, they get an error that the folder is in use. This happens every time. However, if they create "test" and then "test2" inside of it, they can delete "test" first and it works fine.

Basically, if anything has been deleted inside of a folder, the folder itself cannot be deleted afterward.

I installed unlocker to find out what if anything is locking the folder from being deleted in the situations above, and it always turns out to be EXPLORER.EXE.

The user's access level is "Power User" -- we also logged into our administrator account on the machine and it also experiences the same problem.

We've disabled everything that loads up on startup via MSConfig, as well as disabling any non essential services from loading at startup, however the problem still persists.

Her machine is free of malware as well per Mcafee Enterprise 8.5i, superantispyware, malwarebyes, spybot, and combofix.

At this point the only other solution I can think of is a full restore on the machine which I'd rather avoid if possible!

Have any of you come across this before? Aware of any other solutions I can try?

Thanks!

6/18/2009 12:59:30 PM

You already are aware of unlocker, and as noted, mentioned explorer.exe holding the lock on this file. Dumb question, can this be reproduced with another user's machine with similar privileges? Will a reboot solve?

Otherwise, please submit a bug to Microsoft Technical Support. I personally think a format / reinstall may be overkill unless the end user dislikes it THAT much.

6/18/2009 7:01:31 PM

Try opening up a command window and then shutting down explorer.exe through taskmgr and deleting the folder the old fashioned way (del "C:\users\whatever\foldername") then restarting explorer.

Sometimes that works when nothing else does.

6/18/2009 7:08:49 PM

All of our users in that department are setup with the same access levels/privileges and their machines are configured identically in terms of software packages/updates/etc. Out of everyone, hers is the only one with the problem.

El Nacho -- that does work, however with her machine its not just the one folder doing this -- its any/every folder that has had any containing folders removed. So basically anytime she needs to delete a folder, she would have to go through that process which isn't going to be an adequate solution unfortunately.

I am generally against reformatting a machine, however in this case its a situation where she needs to be up and running 100% by Monday. Unfortunately I think it's going to be the only option in the given time frame. At least all of her work is stored on the network, so its just a matter of reformatting/reinstalling/reconfiguring and she is good to go.

Thanks for the suggestions Perlith and Nacho!

6/19/2009 9:55:36 AM

this really sounds like a permission issue (if it was vista, id def say it was).

Also try repairing the windows install/explorer file.

[Edited on June 20, 2009 at 7:08 PM. Reason : !]

6/20/2009 7:07:24 PM