Jelle Druyts

Finally I found something - by that I actually mean: finally I thought of asking our good friend google (I thought it would be a reflex by now in case of any problem but alas) - that solves a small but wildly irritating problem in Windows Explorer.

If you have a folder with some avi movie files (let's not call it a divx collection) then you can occasionally or even frequently have the problem you can't move or delete one of them. It turns out that it's a Windows XP 'feature' that reads file information from these avi's to put them in say a tooltip or in your Explorer columns. By doing that, it effectively locks the file so you can't delete or move it, and this process can take a while if you have a lot of these files.

Luckily, there's a registry hack that disables this feature, just place a minus sign in front of the registry key {87D62D94-71B3-4b9a-9489-5FE6850DC73E} in the registry hive HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\CLSID. This will just disable the component that looks up this avi information. You may need to restart windows but I sure didn't and it seems to work just fine.

And if you don't trust me enough to just go off and alter your registry, you can always look it up on winguides.com