File Being Used By Another Program.

Question

I posted this over in XP Software, too, but the people here generally respond better (and besides, this is the only folder i've posted in for over a year... lol).

Hey, all.

Well I downloaded a file (it was a movie clip) and I scanned it and it was clean (NAV with all the latest updates). Then I wanted to delete it, so I tried to delete it and an error message came up saying:

"Cannot Delete File: It is being used by another program.
Please close all programs and try again."

So I rebooted, thinking that would close everything, and I still couldn't delete the file. So I started in safe mode, and still couldn't delete it... Then I stopped anything from starting up and I still couldn't delete it...

Anyone have any ideas how to delete this file? =D

-JokerFMJ.

wsnyder · Answer

One way to try: right click on file, select properties.  On that page you should see a line that says 'Opens with'; press Change and reset it to a neutral program (I ususally use Notepad) which you know does not reserve files for its use (like say, Quicktime, or, at times, Windows Media Player).  You may have to reboot, but you should then be able to delete it.

malz · Answer

Thanks for the try, but no luck...  The program associated with it won't change.  Any other ideas?

malz · Answer

My fiancee found this for me and it worked great.

The fix for Windows XP not letting you delete .avi

I've seen this coming up more and more all over the place so I figured I'd stick
it here.

Avi files (divx) can be trouble in xp. there is a fix to let xp behave much better
so it's possible to move or delete large avi files. The obnoxious bug in XP that
causes Explorer to read the entire contents of broken AVI files before allowing any
access to them is caused by bad behavior of shmedia.dll.

To correct this misbehavior in Windows XP, remove the following
registry key.

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE/SOFTWARE/Classes/CLSID/{87D62D94-71B3-4b9a-9489-5FE6850DC73E}/InProcServer32

This will prevent Explorer from loading shmedia.dll in response to file property
queries on these files.

Just an extra note, if you do a "search" for this key it will not be found, look
for it manually it is very easy to find. As always newbie or not, if you FUBAR your
registry its your own fault. This fix does work, I use it and have applied it to
many XP machines. Now go ahead and fix this royal pain in the [expletive]!

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File Being Used By Another Program.

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