How do I delete files that cannot be deleted in the normal way

[Notes]

I also had this problem. It must have come with the latest ICQ or something. I would describe it as lame, stupid, presumptious, and sleasy, sleasy, sleasy, of AOL to do this obviously intentionally. What was some low-life decision maker at AOL thinking. Definitely AOL Hell!!

The below (quoted previous message) helped, in a way.. I did it, but it only ended up with a generic icon instead of the AOL one. Originally, I could right-click it and select 'delete' but it told me only an Administrator could do it.. well, I am an Admin.. so after doing the below, and being clued in to the general idea, I did a search of AOL in my registry. I also found:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\Shell NoRoam\MUICache
Value Name : Data - C:\Program Files\AOD\AolAod.exe : AOL On Desktop

So I deleted that from my registry, and also deleted
C:\Program Files\AOD
entirely..

After a reboot I was then able to delete the icon, which was now a folder with no name, and windows asked me if I was sure, and told me I could restore it by going into the control panel later (?) obviously it was confused, but the icon is gone!

Thanks for the assistance.

Cheers

- N

Originally posted by murakris
I used to have this problem too and had this stupid "Free AOL and Internet" icon (came after installing netscape 7 i think)..
sitting on the desktop. (believe me, there is no way to delete this the normal way! )

There is a folder called aod in the C:\winnt\ which has the icon and a couple of .dll files. You will have to remove these files from your system to remove the icon.

If you are unable to delete the dll file, do this from the command prompt.

c:\winnt\aod\regsvr32 /u <dll-file-name>

Then remove the aod directory. Also search the registry and remove all AOL entries, especially under
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\aod

Hope this helps!

-Murali

[Sidewalk Merc.]

Try this program
http://www.wizard-industries.com/sdel.html

[Steff]

Test this!It really works!

Start button/Run
type: regedit
It opens Registry Editor
choîñe Edit/Find
type: AOL
and delete all that found which is conneted with AOL,
restart ind AOL must disappear

[Savvaqet]

Originally posted by ESALADUANE
See if the Elder Geek's idea works for your problem file.

http://theeldergeek.com/delete_undeletable_file.htm

This suggestion helped me out of a real bear of a trojan, though I had to add to it a little. I had already tried deleting the trojan DLL from DOS, but even there, even in safe mode it was still "in use". I tried the elder geek solution, and the file was still in use even with Explorer killed. I downloaded Process Explorer and was able to see that even Task Manager by itself was keeping this DLL file open. I killed Task Manager and was finally able to delete the file.

I went ahead and ran regedit from the DOS window and could now finally delete the registry entries without the trojan automatically (and immediately) re-adding them. Once done, I restarted Task Manager and Explorer directly from DOS, rebooted and was Trojan free!

Note: More than half a dozen popular virus programs had identified but failed to remove this nasty Coreflood.Backdoor trojan. It wasn't really doing anything that I could tell, but I just wanted it OUT! This finally enabled me to do that.