Since you brought this up - have you ever noticed that quite often, when you kill the explorer in this way and restart it using New Task a whole bunch of icons disappear from the System Tray - I mean, among the one's that were running prior to explorer shutdown, only about 70% of them are redisplayed. Anybody faced this before ??

This is a good method to release the file-locks and delete them - but sometimes, you'd face some obstinate processes (with corresponding .exe files on disk) - which you'd want to delete. They'd get me stymied completely coz:
1. When I tried to delete the .exe, it would report that the process is running and the file is locked. Hence cannot be deleted.
2. I go to Taskman and close down the process.
3. By the time, I go to delete the process .exe, it had started itself back again and won't let me delete it anymore.. This got me immensely infuriated in many situations.

What you need is a tool that'd KILL the process from memory and delete the file from the disk (in realtime - at the same time). Hence I went out on a hunt and found this tool - which came to extremely good use thereafter, particularly for virulent processes - which'd spawn themselves as soon as you shut them down.

Here's where you get it:
1. http://www.bleepingcomputer.com/files/killbox.php
2. http://www.short-media.com/download.php?d=319

This tool ALSO works for the kind of locked files speedy mentioned. Here's a brief intro:


It's a MUST ADDITION to your toolbox. Go grab it NOW
Regards,
m^e

Yea, I come across that all the time. This is a little annoying because, sometimes, you might want to do something with a program running in the systray and you can't access it and when you try to run it from the start menu, it says "another instance runnign in the background, please kill that first and then start a new one". Is there any way to fix this other than killing the processes in the task manager?

Not to get on your case that much but I hope you haven't been visiting any sites that you might be embarrassed for others to see. As it turns out, just by clearing the cache in IE (Tools>Internet Options>Clear History, Delete Cookies, and Delete Files) you are not actually getting rid of all of you history. It’s kind of a dirty little secret by Microsoft. As I wrote this I cleared everything out and then downloaded a utility that will view the cache. Index (History) Reader for Internet Explorer ® 4, 5 or 6 [ http://www.wbaudisch.de/HistoryReader.htm ] was the first one that I found at www.download.com. I ran the program and there were still sites in the history.

The program that I used is one of the quick viewers that anyone can get. I know for a fact that some of the advanced forensic tools that you have to pay big bucks for can ferret out unerased cache very easily and efficiently.

Several files are involved in keeping the cache of Internet Explorer

C:\Documents and Settings\<username>\Cookies\index.dat
C:\Documents and Settings\<username>\Local Settings\History\History.IE5\index.dat
C:\Documents and Settings\<username>\Local Settings\History\History.IE5 \MSHistXXXXXXXXXXX\index.dat
C:\Documents and Settings\<username>\Local Settings\Temporary Internet Files\Content.IE5\index.dat
C:\Documents and Settings\<username>\UserData\index.dat

Any of the above files can hold site information and you will notice that if you open Windows Explorer and go to C:\Documents and Settings\<username>\Local Settings\History\ there will be no files but a special display with the timeframe of cached files. Furthermore even if you open a DOS windows and browse to this location you will not see any files. Apparently if a file is marked as system, archive, and hidden you will not be able to see it on the OS no matter what. I had to write my own VB.NET program to list the files and subdirectories. After locating the files the very hard way I tried to delete them only to find out that they were in use by IE, even when IE was not in use. All the index.dat files are in use from the time Windows start will the time Windows shuts down. The only way that I have found thus far to remove them is to get special third-party software that will delete them before Windows full starts. Another approach is to boot into safe mode and then delete them.

When I asked earlier if this also worked on IE cache this is what I meant.

References:
http://www.acesoft.net/delete_index.dat_files.htm
http://browsertools.net/IE-Privacy-Keeper/index-dat.html
http://www.milincorporated.com/a_indexdat.html
http://www.wbaudisch.de/HistoryReader.htm

If any of you want to clear your tracks totally (I do this once a month), then use CCLeaner. The latest releases are swines to install. They seem to have some vendeter against being used <.< Anyway, when I used it last, it removed 185MB of Adobe History, IE files and such that were untouched by anything else. And that is after me formatting the hard drive.

Why is it, that so many people can delete their temporary files and not suffer, yet when I do it, my whole system seems to get cleared out. I am having no luck. Perhaps I should give in now.

Never give in!!!

I would have a "backup" ready just incase. Unless you know what you are deleting, this delteing process (altho effective) can cause some headaches

I tried deleting a corrupted avi file by this method but it didn't happen.
please suggest other way?

-nikhil

You might want to check out the tool FileMon from SysInternals (http://www.microsoft.com/technet/sysinternals/FileAndDisk/Filemon.mspx). It shows every file that is open on your system and which program that has it open. I sometimes can’t delete a file that is still open because I don’t know which program is still using it. It is often the case that the program in question failed to properly shutdown or crashed and thus never released the file handle. If all else fails I simply reboot and all the handles are released.

Just download and install unlocker. It's a right-click item that lets you close file handles and then optionally delete, rename, or move the file.

http://ccollomb.free.fr/unlocker/