I have a mystery folder. When I try to open it, the machine freezes and I have to go into the task manager to end the task. When I try to delete it, it tells me that it is either locked or in use, and as far as I can tell, neither is the case. When I place the cursor over the folder, Windows tells me it is empty, for whatever that's worth. The folder is from a movie I tried to download through Bittorent, and then cancelled due to a big fat zero on the download speed. I've tried to delete it with BT running and BT not running; there is no effect either way. I have a firewall / virus thing through Earthlink that hasn't picked up anything. Can I restart through a system CD or something and delete it that way? If so, how do I do this? This technique worked on every Mac I ever owned. The computer runs fine so long as I don't jack with this stupid folder. Christ I HATE Windows! I'm on a new Toshiba Satellite running Wondows XP. Thanks in advance....
Sure. Go to www.bootdisk.com and make either a CD boot disk or a floppy boot disk. Delete the file after you boot from CD or floppy (you might have to change boot order in your bios settings)
Thanks....but I have no idea what this means. What does this mean, exactly? Isn't the desktop "Explorer," meaning what I'm looking at when I minimize open apps?
Try the following. You need to know what directory the folder exists in. Knowing that, do the following (assume it is in c:\My Documents\Folder_one\Bad_Folder): Go to Start->All Programs->Accessories->Command Prompt In the Command Prompt window do do the following: cd c:\My Documents\Folder_one rmdir "Bad_Folder" Go ahead and use quotes around the folder name. In case the name contains a space you HAVE to use the quotes. It does not hurt to use them if there are no spaces or special characters.
I had a similar problem and someone suggested Move On Boot or Purge IE and it was easy and worked great. http://www.snapfiles.com/get/moveonboot.html or http://www.purgeie.com/delinv/index.htm and delete file via short name
Try deleting it from the command prompt first (as noted above) Torrent programs have a problem with hanging folders from time to time in my experience.
Move On Boot did the trick. Thanks! FWIW, I couldn't get it to work via command prompt. I entered the directory as instructed, as near as I could tell, anyway. Oh well. Thanks for the suggestions, guys.
