How To Delete A File “Being Used by Another Program”

Have you ever tried to delete a file but all you get is an error message like the following?

It usually shows itself as one of these lovely messages…

• Cannot delete file: Access is denied

• There has been a sharing violation.
• The source or destination file may be in use.
• The file is in use by another program or user.
• Make sure the disk is not full or write-protected and that the file is not currently in use.

Sometimes you may have left the file open while you were trying to move it. But most of the time your sure its closed, for for god knows why windows has decided to hang onto it and make you go through the process of trying to GUESS(since it only says ‘A program‘ and not which one) which one is hanging onto it.

Thanks to the program Unlocker Assistant, you can easily take care of this issue without any hassle. Simply install it and go. Whenever you get the error, Unlocker will come up and give you options to kill the program(s) it found using it, or attempt a force delete.

It also ads an extra option to the Right-Click menu called Unlocker, which brings to the menu of the program if you want to delete whole files that are giving the issue.

The program is of course free, and I have found no problem with it on XP. Don’t know how well it works on Vista though…

The program can be downloaded from here.

Tags: error, xp problems, xp solutions, windows