Gingham, You might take a look here.

UNLOCKER 1.8.5 BY CEDRICK 'NITCH' COLLOMB. Hope this helps

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I Don't Suffer From Insanity, I Enjoy Every Minute of it

in task manager look for a process that is using up resources....and spiraling up and up and up...kill that process if there is one..basically, if you have just booted up (OK, a few minutes after boot up) no process should be using any great amount of resources....find one, kill it off, then delete..then reboot...and see if said process still exists....if it does, then you have a deeper problem...

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So Long and Thanks for All the Files
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Beware of the big 3 insurance companies in Texas! Read your policies carefully (maybe you'll need a lawyer) Allstate, Farmers & State Farm are overextended and their 'coverage' is worthless...a true waste of your money Read This

I've tried the unlocker program. It tells me there's a debugging error every time. I'll take another look at task manager. Am I the only one in the history of limewire users to have this problem?

nope...I've dealt with this before...but as I noted in my first post of this thread, I have a dual boot system, so my 'fix' was easy...I booted into my 'backup' OS, and deleted the file from there...

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So Long and Thanks for All the Files
_____________________________________________

Beware of the big 3 insurance companies in Texas! Read your policies carefully (maybe you'll need a lawyer) Allstate, Farmers & State Farm are overextended and their 'coverage' is worthless...a true waste of your money Read This

If you've dealt with this before, do you have any idea what kind of a file I'm looking at here? According to every scanner I can find, it's not a virus or spyware...yet it's the only file on my system I can't seem to get rid of. Under my "Users", it's included in a folder seperately created and labeled Downloads...not to be confused with "My Downloads". I can't delete the folder either.

What the hell is this thing? At one point during my various attempts to nuke it, I thought I saw a .rar extension on the end of the file name, but it doesn't show up anywhere else as such. AAAAAGGGHHHH

from what you've described, I think you have been HiJacked in some fashion....the attempt to play the video file initiated a sequence of events, and I bet you are infected as of this point...what I'm hoping (for your sake) is that the infection is limited to the presence of the video file on your machine...but I suspect it isn't...what I'm thinking (because of the fact you can't get rid of it in safe mode) is that it has attached itself to a system process...

now, I know from experience you can kill off a hell of a lot of system processes before you actually cripple your system (of course rebooting solves the issues, as said processes start right up again)....explorer.exe is one of the processes that should cripple your OS if you terminate it....what I've done in the past is to just start killing off processes and see what happens...worst case I had to hit the restart button on the box to reboot as I had crippled the OS to the point that I couldn't use the start bar to do so...The_Point being you hopefully can start randomly terminating processes and after you do so for each one, try the deleting of the file...what I would do is have folders open with the files you want to delete...kill processes via task manager, and try deletion at each step...

now, here's the way I look at situations like yours: at some point it becomes obvious that a LOT of time is being spent....and maybe a LOT more is required...so what I do is to just take a nice deep breath, take a thalamic pause, and shrug my shoulders, backup all data, and do a nice clean install and be COMPLETELY POSITIVE that the problem will be gone when I get done...

__________________


So Long and Thanks for All the Files
_____________________________________________

Beware of the big 3 insurance companies in Texas! Read your policies carefully (maybe you'll need a lawyer) Allstate, Farmers & State Farm are overextended and their 'coverage' is worthless...a true waste of your money Read This

I'll try the systematic killing of system processes and see what happens. A clean install is the last resort of course, but if that's what it takes...

it would be best if you do this while offline...i.e. physically disconnected from the internet..

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So Long and Thanks for All the Files
_____________________________________________

Beware of the big 3 insurance companies in Texas! Read your policies carefully (maybe you'll need a lawyer) Allstate, Farmers & State Farm are overextended and their 'coverage' is worthless...a true waste of your money Read This

Well, killing all of my system processes didn't seem to fix the problem. Just out of curiosity, I tried compressing the offending file using Winrar...that worked and created a compressed copy in the same folder the file exists. I was able to delete the .rar file, but still couldn't do anything with the original. One thing I've noted is that whenever I try to run one of the various cleaners/deleters/unlockers on this file, the program ends up "Not responding". How would a file be able to have that affect on so many different types of programs?

Gingham

I have been infected with undeletable files in the recent past but nothing like the one you have.

Anyway, what I have found that works with my undeletables is to use the delete function in LW's library, that should work in most cases.

Good Luck


UK Bob