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Cannot erase .avi


Felix2112

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I have one .avi movie that I cannot erase, move or rename...

(It is being used by another person or program)

I had this trouble a while ago and I think there's a command or a file to delete to correc that, I'm not sure...

Thanx for your help.

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explorer.exe (aka the shell) is (or was) trying to grab media information about that file... all i do in that case is run a cmd window from that folder, use task manager to end explorer.exe (dont close task manager yet), use the cmd window to delete the avi that wont go away (del <filename>)...use tab to autocomplete the name if needed...then go to file->new task in task manager..type 'explorer' (without quotes), then delete the folder if ya want...

if this doesnt work, something other than explorer is trying to access the file...

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When that happens Process Explorer should have highlighted a handle in the bottom pane. If the only program that has the file open is explorer.exe (and it's not being copied or read by another user or something), you can probably safely close the handle, which will let you delete it.

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It's a bit of a stretch to call it a bug without any knowledge other than a handle open by explorer.exe. Also remember that explorer.exe runs Microsoft and 3rd party code - if you run autoruns and shellexview, disable all non-Microsoft items and reboot, and the problem with explorer.exe still persistst, then you have more of a case. For now, it could be ANY application on your system with a hook into explorer.exe causing this, and that's more likely than explorer.exe holding a handle open for no reason - especially considering this would likely happen to all video (or at least .avi files) if a bug in explorer.exe exists, and it'd probably be a pretty well-known one by now, too.

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Also, most of the time that happens with large AVIs, usually 700mb movies and things as such. Often, if you click on it, wait for the information to appear in the status bar of explorer, THEN try to delete it, everything's fine. If that still doesn't work, then I would also recommend using Unlocker.

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For me I use this regtweak and I never had problem with .avi ...

[-HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Classes\SystemFileAssociations\.avi\shellex\PropertyHandler]

Doing so should be said with warning because you will no longer be able to view the AVI properties within Explorer.

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I have had the same problem so I wroye a script that will delete the file.

All I do now is drag the file onto this script.

Dim Fso : Set Fso = CreateObject("Scripting.FileSystemObject")
Dim DelFile
For Each DelFile in Wscript.Arguments : Fso.DeleteFile(DelFile) : Next

Thread to read more

Here is a link to a rar file with the above script.

Drag_And_Drop_Delete

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