I was fighting this for way too long for such a simple operation, and found a great fix. Basically there was a resource fork on my file at H:\pictures\thumbs.db
. I tried adding jpegs to get the filesize to change and it did, but I still could not delete the file. So what I did instead was use this utility called ADSCheck
from SourceForge: http://sourceforge.net/projects/adscheck/
It's a command-line utility, so open up a command prompt, and then run in my case (I copied adscheck.exe to H:):
adscheck.exe H:\pictures /d
The /d
switch will delete all alternate data streams in the path, which it did.
At that point for some reason I still couldn't delete the Thumbs.db file, so I said to heck with it, and just used edit
at the command-line:
edit H:\pictures\thumbs.db
I then typed in some garbage text, and saved the file out. At that point I confirmed that I could manipulate it by renaming it:
move H:\pictures\Thumbs.db H:\pictures\iwashere.txt
Then I did:
del *.* cd H: rmdir pictures
And it's all cleaned up.