SeaOfGoats

It's ok, I know what was said as I already read the thread in its entirety. Just to clarify the part of my post that you replied to -- the essence of his initial question was how to delete files that a running system always has open, and thus locked from deletion. He wasn't asking for general purpose deletion solutions, and therefore had no need to apologize for his initial question getting answers from you that didn't solve his problem. Hope this clears up what I meant.

Hi dr_st, You may also find this interesting: http://home.eunet.no/~pnordahl/ntpasswd/bootdisk.html It allows read-write access to NTFS for the purpose of registry editing and password resetting, but you could also use it to rename or delete previous Windows install directories. (By the way, I don't think you have anything to apologise for in your initial post -- clearly AlecStaar did not comprehend the question correctly.)