Annoying dll's

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Xonet
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Annoying dll's

Post by Xonet »

I was wondering if anyone could help me.

As i am cleaning up my whole pc atm (was a real mess again) i'm having some problems removing some nasty dll's from programs wich i've installed and deinstalled a long time ago. When i try to remove them i get the famous message (won't be the same as in english versions of windows cuz it's my translating :) ) that the file is secured or in use. Well, if anyone has any advise on how to remove them id be really happy.

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Post by bad_brain »

Hey Xonet... :wink:
Ok, here´s what I would do:

- clean your list of programs which startup together with XP (um, I assume it´s XP), you can find the lists by starting msconfig.
-clean your registry from entries you don´t need anymore, I do this with regcleaner, a real nice program, I´ll add it to the dl-section.
-clean the prefetch-folder: C:/Windows/Prefetch, you should do this anyway from time to time because it´ll speed-up the boot-time too. You can erase all in this folder, the needed programs will write a new entry into the folder at the next boot-up, so don´t wonder when it takes a little longer at the first time.

Ok,now check if the dlls are still not eraseable, if yes they´re maybe needed by other programs. To find out which programs handles the dll you can use Process Explorer, it gives you more information than the Windows Taskmanager and the user interface is much more comfy. You can even replace the TaskManager with it, but there is a little bug: If you changed the Path-variable because you develop Java-applications for example Process Explorer can´t be started (at least on my system). But well, you can change the path back to the system32-folder anytime.

Hm, I think that´s all for now, let me know if it worked... :wink:

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Post by Xonet »

well, i had allready done all those things before i made this thread (except the process explorer thing). As i have Ad-aware professional wich includes ad-watch i can see that explorer itself uses the dll's when i want to unload the dll's it simply doesn't respond, so that's kinda annoying since i would probobly be able to delete them when i shutdown explorer but then i don't know how to :?

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Post by bad_brain »

Hm, strange, are you really sure the dll isn´t needed?
I tried to end all threads opened by explorer.exe with Process Explorer, and it worked without any problems, just right-click the process>properties and then you can kill the threads one by one. Let me know if it worked, if not post the name of the dll, maybe I can find out something.... :wink:

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Post by Xonet »

problem solved on accident :wink: i downloaded mcafee internet security and was configuring it. then i saw a mcafee tool, file shredder, doesn't matter if the file is in use or not, file shredder deletes it anyway :), just started loving mcafee even more

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