Deleting "undeletable" files in Vista

You'll want to first take ownership of the files, which is easiest when you add Take Ownership to the right-click menu.

Once you've done that, you can do one of the following:

• Use Unlocker to remove whatever is locking the file, and then delete it.
• Use Boot Deleter to delete it when you reboot.
• Try and rename the file, sometimes you can rename them when you can't delete them. Once you reboot, you can delete it.
• Try and delete it from safe mode.
• Delete it from the command prompt, usually safe mode works the best.

I had a similar problem deleting a seemingly empty folder.

These are the steps I had taken:

1. Use Cedrick Collomb's Unlocker to remove any locks
2. Use Unlocker to delay delete on reboot
3. Turn off windows search service to prevent indexing of folder
4. Deleted user rights of "unkown user" (rights from previous OS)
5. Took ownership of folder
6. Rename folder to delete
7. Delete from command line with admin rights
8. Delete in Safe Mode

None of these solutions worked for me.

My solution:

It then occurred to me that the file system might have become corrupted. I therefore ran check and repair of the file system by running

chkdsk /f