rcgreen... I'm not on XP, but do you need to run taskmgr like it says to in that link? When that happens on my system I can just do the "Start>>Run>>command" and get my dos prompt and delete the file using it's dos name. XP may be different though. Any idea why this happens? Is it just unlucky coppuption of a file? I've had it happen a few times, but not enough to be worried. Deleting through the dos command prompt has worked fine on 98se and win2k server.