Comments on: Vista Explorer denies you access to broken EXE-files.

By: Pierre-Marc

Pierre-Marc — Mon, 16 Feb 2009 20:01:03 +0000

I’ve had a similar problem with Explorer from Vista x64.

I could not modify any HTML file in a specific folder.

After using Process Monitor and handles.exe, I found out that Explorer.exe was causing the problem. After many hours of testing, I found out that I could solve the problem by disabling the “Preview” pane in Explorer.

My guess is that when I did browse inside the folder, Explorer tried to create a preview of the file, encountered an error and never timed out, which lead to Explorer never releasing it’s handle on the file.

By: yogi yang

yogi yang — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 13:50:24 +0000

I think (with my limited knowledge) that this problem is not only with VISTA. It also exist in XP. I have faced it.

My problem was such that even after rebooting my PC I could not delete the file as well as folder. I did everything that I could but nothing allowed me to delete.

So ultimately I booted in Win2000 and then deleted the file from there and everything got deleted immediately.

Again after some days I faced this same problem but this time the storage media was a USB pen drive. An you know what? I could not delete with XP even after changing to another physical PC, but could delete it from Win2000.

I fired up one of my favorite tracing tools Handles, RegMon and FileMon from http://www.sysinternals.com.

After tracing I came to the conclusion that whenever XP misses to release the Handle of a file that particular file cannot be deleted even if we change from one XP (physical PC) to another XP (physical PC).

By: Christian Wimmer

Christian Wimmer — Sat, 26 Jul 2008 20:05:29 +0000

Yes I know the Unlocker. And I also did try it out. However it could find no handle to it to close. So it was useless.

By: CodeX

CodeX — Sat, 26 Jul 2008 18:20:45 +0000

I can confirm, that there are strange problems with the explorer of Vista.

I had a similar but not the same problem.
I reorganized some bigger files (~100mb) until one of them couldn’t be moved. It was copied to the new location but still remained in the old place as well. When selecting it and hitting Shift+Del it disappeared immediately without any dialog! But refreshing that folder showed that file again. Hitting just Del gave the common dialog but told afterwards that it’s not possible to delete the file. Command line didn’t work as well. Closing all windows and rebooting didn’t help either.
Maybe I should mention that however the filesitze was still shown as 100mb I couldn’t access the content of the file anymore.

I solved it by using the little tool Unlocker. It showed that the file is used twice by explorer.exe. I used the free & delete options to get rid of the file. Afterwards I was also able to delete the folder the file has been in, using the normal way in the explorer.

By: Christian Wimmer

Christian Wimmer — Sat, 26 Jul 2008 17:47:47 +0000

As I said I have no idea why this happens. I see the file handle in the handles list of ProcessExplorer. Usually one could close such a hande but not this one.
I also checked the thread status to see if there are any running external threads : nothing.
To my suprise the explorer of another user works fine on the same Windows. So I suspect it is something with my own user profile.

By: Daniel Wischnewski

Daniel Wischnewski — Sat, 26 Jul 2008 14:01:57 +0000

Hi,

I have tried it. I created an empty .exe file. Closed Explorer and opened the folder with this empty .exe again. I selected the file and hit the [DEL] key. And after requesting whether I really want to delete the file it was deleted. No problem whatsoever. Windows Vista Ultimate German, all Patches applied.