Force-Deleting Stubborn Files in Windows

Not being able to delete a file might be one of Windows’ biggest annoyances. Out of the blue, for no reason, Windows may suddenly refuse to let you delete a file and you find yourself at the mercy of some buggy application that took control of the file but forgot to relinquish it. What you then have is an undeletable file, since Windows would still see the file as being in use, and therefore will not allow its deletion.

Enter Unlocker, a tiny application, completely free, which will fix all your problems and be useful whenever you're stuck with this problem. It adds itself to Explorer's context menu and places a small icon in the taskbar. Whenever you encounter such an error, it will automatically grab it and ask you if you want to "unlock" the file. This will destroy all the file locks placed by any application which is currently using the file, allowing you to modify/delete it as per your needs.

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It comes as a tiny 255-KB application that will be installed instantly. Once done, just right click on the offending file and click on Unlocker. It will instantly list all applications that are currently locking the file. To unlock the file, just click on "Unlock All" to kill all open handles for that file. Alternatively, you can instead kill the process that's hogging the file or select a specific application from the list and destroy all the handles created by that application.

Once you've unlocked the file, all that's left to do is delete it. If Unlocker fails at unlocking the file, it will offer you the option to delete the file at the next Windows startup, since the offending application wouldn't yet have had a chance to lock the file. In most cases you won’t need to resort to this final step, but it's good to know that this application can be used to weed out the hardest-to-delete files as well.

For more help and how-to's, check out other articles in the Bright Hub Windows collection, such as 21 Ways to Speed Up Vista: Part 7 - Delete Unnecessary Files and Enhance PC Performance – Organize your Default Folders .