I have a video file on my computer I would like to get rid of, and cannot. Each time I try, I get the dialog box saying “Recyling 1 item (54.5 mb) from C:\user…Realplayer downloads” Discovered 0 items (0 bytes)." The progress bar just faffs about as if it were actually doing something, but nothing ever happens, and eventually I get annoyed and cancel it. Simply clicking on the cancel button in the dialog box stops the illusory process; I don’t have to go to the task manager or anything. There is no noticeable system slowdown while it’s pretending to delete the item; I just checked to be sure, and while the delete dialog box is active, CPU usage never gets above 3%. I have tried renaming the file; when I do, that folder freezes, but nothing else happens to the system. I did it just now to be sure, and though the Realplayer downloads box remains greyed out, everything else works fine.
I don’t believe I have any malware. I update and scan with AVG & Ad-Aware at least once a day; that includes rootkit checks. I have also run the free versions of MalwareBytes, SuperAntiSpyware, and Spybot; none of those report any problems either. I am running Windows Vista. I have already run CCCleaner to check for registry errors, then rebooted; still no soap.
It could be that your hard drive is going bad and disk requests to that area of the disk are not returning properly. You could run something like HD Tune to check your “reallocated sector count” and run a full disk scan to check for bad sectors.
If it is not hardware related, your best bet for removing the file is to boot the system into “safe mode,” then run “Command Prompt” as Administrator and delete the file manually from the command line.
Sometimes simply rebooting will work w/o going into safe mode, as the file may still be used by a program until you shut off the computer. The folder freezing up when you try to rename the file is a good clue that some program didn’t shut down properly.
If the problem is indeed being caused by a file being “in use” by some phantom program — which 99 times out of 100 is actually Explorer.exe — you can delete it without having to reboot at all by using Unlocker, an explorer add-on more precious to me than at least two of my actual body parts.
Once you’ve installed it, simply right-click the file and select “Unlocker…”, choose Delete from the dropdown, and press Unlock All. BAM! Gone forever. This utility has saved me more time, frustration, and needless reboots than I can remember. In fact, I think I’ma go toss the developer a few bucks right now.
I leave recycle bin turned off. It is one of the first things I do when installing the OS. If I didn’t want to delete it, I wouldn’t. It’s bad enough that the OS asks me if I am “sure” before it does so (though this does stop accidentally hitting the wrong key).
That’s why I leave it on. I hate that message. But I still get a way to undo it if I push the button accidentally.
Also, Skald: Unlocker is great if you’re sure no program is actually using the file. But if one really is, that program will almost certainly crash at some point after the file is deleted. (They expect locking to be sufficient to keep the file from disappearing right from under them.) You’re probably better off rebooting after using unlocker, at least as soon as is practical.
You can also schedule the file to be deleted when you reboot (and all files are supposed to be unlocked by then) by using this tip. Or using a program, if you don’t want to mess with the registry.
I see you’ve already found a workaround, but the likely cause is that your recycle bin was sized waaaaaaaay to large, and it filled up. This causes file deletion to run absurdly slow.
In Windows, the recycle bin is typically auto-sized at something like 10% of the hard drive… which was fine when hard drives were 1GB, but not so fine now that they’re 100GB (and not so necessary either… who needs 10GB of recycle space?) A quick Google search will tell you how to resize your recycle bin to a more realistic size.
Just a suggestion: Did you exit out of this file in a funny manner? Sometimes, the file thinks the application still has it open OR vice versa. Go into the application and re-open the file. Then, close out of it in the proper manner. Then, this may now allow you to delete the file upon proper exit.
