Being used by another file or program

NET without issue. But now cannot build. Is possible your code base is in DropBox or constantly-backup file system? I'm not using either of those. Add a comment. Active Oldest Votes. Community Bot 1 1 1 silver badge. From that post, I tried compmgmt. This is a Windows Service project and the service had already been stopped. But I did see the EXE was still running. I killed it and all is well. Deepansh Gupta Deepansh Gupta 4 4 silver badges 9 9 bronze badges. Was a little deceiving since I had already stopped the Windows Service.

It's EXE continued to run. Yeah, weird things happen during coding and even wierdier in production environments : — Deepansh Gupta. Unlocker has never really helped me. What unlocker tool are you referring to? It means a user is trying to open the OST file which has been already in use by some other tool.

But, the main reason of the following error is when multiple users or application tries to use the same OST file. Also, there are some other reasons also, which are discussed below. One of the initial steps that may be helpful to fix these errors is to finish the background Outlook process. Users have to follow the step to perform the task. If, users still have to face issues even after using this solution then, it is best to use technical solution for accomplishing the task.

This is the solution that users have been looking for, as this tool can easily solve Outlook OST file being used by another program as easily as users cannot even imagine. It is important for us to tell users why this tool is perfect for users and why we highly recommend it to them. Although it isn't typical, sometimes a program may encounter an issue, which makes it slower to close.

In this instance, the program may still be using the file you're attempting to delete, which generates this error message. If you cannot find the file with the steps above, try the delete option in the next section. It may be possible to delete the file or folder through Windows Safe Mode. Windows has screwed up the file locking mechanism. Is there a way to delete this file without downloading someone's unlocking utility? I find the sites offering these programs to be a tad sketchy.

How could you force the file to unlock from within a program? I'm competent in Java, Perl, and Ruby, but I haven't seen anything among their libraries that would aid me here.

I've successfully used Process Explorer to find out which process has the file open. It saves a reboot that may not fix the problem anyway.

It'll select a handle in the main window, which you can right click and close. Try downloading "Unlocker". It is pretty cool utility and works great.

Give it a try. Did you try the commandline command OpenFiles. If you reboot and the files are still locked, then there is some process on your machine that is still using them. First you should figure out what that process is and determine if the files really aren't used any more or not. Rebooting to Safe Mode is often a very easy way to do it. When you boot in safe mode, it won't load all the stuff set to run on startup.

Press F8 while it's booting to access the boot menu, and choose "safe mode". I had a. That brought me to this thread.