Deleting A Write Protected Program

[dirtybuck]

A friend of mine was very generous in sending me a new MP3 player to replace the old one that I accidentally "fried" (it got water in it) for Christmas.

I plugged it into a USB port, and the program for capturing songs and doing playlists installed on to my computer. For some reason, however, it wasn't working properly.

I (so I thought) deleted the program through Control Panel on Windows XP. I then went to the Philips website to download the program that was in my MP3 player. It started giving me some error messages and wasn't functioning properly.

I again deleted it using Add/Remove programs in the Control Panel on Windows XP. For the sheer hell of it, I decided to see if the program still might reside on my hard drive. Sure enough, when I did a search for it in Programs, it was there. I tried to delete by clicking on the file folder, but I got the "access denied..folder may be write protected" error message.

If anyone can assist me on this, I'd GREATLY appreciate it.

Thanks!

 

[joeekaitis]

 

 

 

First see if the program is in the system tray or notification area at the bottom right of the screen. If so, right click it and shut it down. Try to uninstall it again.

If that doesn't work, boot into Safe Mode, right click the program's folder and select Properties. One of the tabs should have the Read-Only check box which you can uncheck, allowing you to delete the folder.

This could result in some minor registry corruption which you can clean up with a free program called CCleaner from www.piriform.com.

 

[dirtybuck]

Unfortunately, it didn't work. I still got the same error message.

 

[qualin]

You can't delete the Program Files folder when in safe mode?

What errors are you getting and what exactly are you trying to delete?

Try this..

1. Uninstall the program using add/remove programs
2. Reboot
3. See if the folder is still there under c:&#92program files&#92
4. If you can't delete it, reboot into safe mode (Tap F8 when booting) then try to delete it.
5. If you can't delete it, right click on the folder and check for read-only mode and clear that. Then delete it.
6. If you still can't delete it, reboot and download unlocker. (Google it) .. Use unlocker to unlock the folder and delete it that way. Beware, this can cause your machine to crash and cause unstable operation, use with care.

If you are getting errors other than "Access Denied", please post them here with screenshots.

As per Joe's advice, you'll also need to use CCleaner to clean out the leftover bits in your registry after you do the uninstallation.

Process Explorer will also tell you which process is locking a file:
http://windowsxp.mvps.org/processlock.htm

If you end that process using the task manager, that will release the lock on the file and then you can delete it. Again, be careful! You can mess your machine up pretty badly doing this.

If your machine acts strangely afterwards, reboot and that may resolve the issue.

Good luck.

 

[dirtybuck]

Well...

I don't know what I was doing wrong the first time, but I tried it again and..SUCCESS! It's all gone now and ready for a new installation.

Thanks!

 

[dirtybuck]

GRRRR!!

The Songbird installation isn't going all that well. I'm getting the following error messages. TO THE BEST OF MY KNOWLEDGE, I've deleted everything associated with that program. I also ran CC Cleaner and still got these messages.

Message #1

 

[dirtybuck]

Here is message 2. sorry, I got pic 1 and 2 mixed up..but I'm sure you guys can figure out what came first and which one was second.

 

[dirtybuck]

Message #3 As I said in the first message, to the best of my knowledge, I've deleted everything that was associated with a Philips file name.

 

[dirtybuck]

Message 4

 

[joeekaitis]

 

 

 

If your user account has administrative rights, create another administrator account, reboot and log in with the new account and see if you can complete the installation.

 

[mrb627]

Registry

You may have orphaned registry entries that indicate a version is still installed. Open regedit and do a search for songbird and/or phillips and remove any entries that don't belong.

** Backup your registry beforehand.

Malcolm