Hello- I've got a file that i wish to delete, but when i try to it says that there is a sharing violation. After repeated restarts, still no luck. I've determined that the process locking it is explorer.exe (i think), but ending explorer.exe completely wipes everything away and I'm forced to completely restart. Can anyone help me figure out a way to delete this file? Is there a prompt outside of windows i can go to to delete it? Thanks!

The reason why it want let you delete that file is becasue another program is using it or needs it to be able to run. Why do you think its Explorer? Explorer might need it to run. Can you tell us what the file is your trying to delete?

it's a WinRAR archive i downloaded. it's completely arbitrary. I downloaded and extracted the contents - an imaging application. Now i cant delete the original. Another note about the file itself: It's SUPPOSED to be a RAR, but it's being read as an .exe. When i run the exe, the command prompt opens and it says the the file is too large to be loaded into memory. To extract the files, I acually had to use the winRAR shell extension to extract the files. Either way, it's a completely useless archive file. I dont see why i cant delete it. there are NO programs that rely on it all...

What has worked for me in the past is renaming it and then reboot the box. Then it comes up as that name and it releases it from the other program that is using it or whatever. Then you can delete it. Might not help you but has for me in the past.

unfortunately i have the sharing violation problem so i can't even rename the file... any more suggestions?

Boot with a W98 disk to get an A: prompt Then change it to C: prompt and do search for the file. Then you should be able to delete it using the DOS command. If you have not got a W98 bootdisk you can download one from http://www.bootdisk.com/ By the way, if there is sharing violation, you might find that you have buggered up something else. When you run Windows you will soon find out. If you do, then you will need to run sfc /scannow and insert your W2K CD. The program will reinstall files that may have been corrupted, unfortunately it does not provide a report. Probably a better alternative for gettting rid of WinRAR is to delete the file in the registry. The quickest way to locate the files is to use regseeker Use it to do a search, highlight all the files associated with WinRAR, ensure that the backup box is ticked, then delete. At this point run Windows and see if anything is amiss. If everything is OK then do a Win search for the files and you should have no problems deleting them. If there are problems with your OS then use regseeker to restore the backup. Good luck and tell us how you went.