Just recently I was downloading some pictures off of Kazaa Lite… I got a file named something like “BRITTANY SPEARS F*** RAPE PORN…” you get the idea… Anyway, it took me about 3 seconds to realize this wasn’t actually a picture, and every time I tried to view it in Kazaa, it crashed the program. I can’t delete it either, or open it in Notepad… I get an “Access Denied” message. If I try do delete the folder it’s in, it says “Cannot find file so and so”.
I’ve also scanned it with Norton and it didn’t detect it as a virus…
You failed to mention what version of Windows your running. Your probably going to have to go “old school” and boot with a floppy, go to where the file is, and manually delete it.
Have you got windows set up to hide extensions of known file types? - if you have, it might not be a jpg, but something like filename.jpg.exe, which would make it a program.
Have you tried <CTRL><ALT><DEL> and looking for it in the task list?; if you can shut it down from there, it should be possible to delete the file.
I was planning on mentioning that, too… File types are not hidden, and my first task when starting the computer is quitting all nonessential programs, except Trillian and Norton. I don’t know what it is, but I don’t like it sitting there, if only for the principle of the thing.
I had something simillar, and it had copied itself many times as files named similarly. You might want to try downloading a trial version of Mcafee virus scan, as it solved the problem when it was fully updated (the program should check for the latest ‘virus definitions’).
Make sure you’re running a good firewall like Zone Alarm - it will tell you if any sleazy programs are trying to access the Internet without your permission. That might give you a clue what this is, e.g. “HackerBackDoorProgram is trying to access the Internet. Do you wish to allow it?”
Don’t let the name mislead you, a scrap file can be executed, and for most Windows systems the extension is automatically hidden even when you have “hide known extensions” turn off.
I’ve checked. It’s not a scrap file, SwatIt didn’t detect anything.
However, the filename is several characters too long for the computer, and I have an inkling that’s what’s been buggering it up… I can’t rename it either.
I can’t think of an MS OS where you can’t enter DOS mode. Even in XP you can get there, you just need to type out “command prompt” in the run dialogue, instead of having the shortcut on the program list.
CnoteChris, starting the computer in DOS mode and opening a DOS window are two very different things. At any rate, you can always start the computer in DOS mode from a floppy.
If a filename uses special characters Windows may not find them. This happens to me when I try to read a file off a CD ROM which was recorded from a computer running Windows in Chinese. The other computer can read it fine but my computer cannot read the file even though it displays it as being there. The way I get around this is:
Start in DOS. Suppose the name of the file is ERT***.AVI where the asterisks represent the problem characters. Go to the folder and do DIR ERT*.* or DIR .AVI or whatever. IF the only file you get is that one then you can do DEL ERT.* or DEL *.AVI or whatever and it will delete it. Wildcards do work.
The reason you want to use DIR first is to make sure you are not deleting other files you want to keep. If there are other files then you can rename them temporarily so the wildcards will not affect them.
Maybe I’m misunderstanding this, but I thought my comment was in response to the poster who queried whether it was possible to delete the file in DOS mode. Someone came along and speculated that XP did away with DOS.
About all I said is that they hadn’t, it just wasn’t as obvious to get to as it once was.
If they’d been talking about booting into DOS mode, which in fact is different than what I was talking about, my answer would have reflected that.
Again, maybe I read it wrong, but it seems to me he/she is talking about entering DOS mode from within the OS, which is why my answer was what it was.
The point, Cnote is that a DOS window is not a DOS mode. There is is no DOS ‘mode’ in the latest Window versions, XP included.
A ‘mode’ suggests an alternative OS to Windows ‘mode’, but a DOS window in these cases is really just a pretend OS. It’s not really being an operating system at all. It’s just another application that happens to look like DOS. So any file operations, like deleting for instance, are still going through Windows’ control. So trying to delete a file using DOS in XP won’t achieve anything you can’t do in XP.
