Unable to delete thumbs.db

Hello,

Probably is a bit late for this, but what really help me:

• Show hidden items.
• Open "Thumbs.db" with notepad.
• Delete everything.
• Save and close notepad.
• Delete "Thumbs.db".
• Delete folder.

Hopefully this works for you :)

I'm looking for a quick and easy solution and not a painful long workaround.

There is an easier solution as i wrote in the initial post:

I'm often succeeding with restarting explorer.exe from the taskmanager's app tab (wondering why explorer.exe is the only process offering "restart" in its context menu) and then being quick enough to delete such folders before explorer grabs em again. But there are always some hard ones which somehow escape this hack.

For such the only working thing i know of is to actually end all explorer.exe processes, delete the folder from a cmd line with rmdir /S/Q "foldername" and restart explorer.exe.

It's just that i felt like there must be a proper solution because what sense does it make to keep a thumbs.db database for an empty folder. This feels like a bug.

Anyway, i tried my two workarounds again and the second one always seems to work.

This way i loose all open explorer windows but at least don't have to restart the whole pc and restore all previously open programs to their previous state because that takes a lot of time.

Although I have never posted to these kinds of forums, I have found a fix. I was struggling with the same issue and found a fix that worked for me.

To restate my issue, I was attempting to delete some folders as I am going through a lot of organization for my company and these "thumbs.db" files were being used by windows and were restricting me from deleting these files. Below is the fix I found which workes for me!

1. In the windows search bar, search "gpedit" to open Edit Group Policy.
2. Follow this path: v User Configuration v Administrative Templates

   v Windows Components
   
     v File Explorer
   

3. Under the File Explorer menu, double-click the third option from the top labled "Turn off the caching of thumbnails in hidden thumbs.db files"
4. In the new window that popped up, select "Enabled" on the top left.
5. Restart your computer.

This will not remove any thumbs.db files that are already there, but it will force File Explorer to not access them and to not create more. Upon restarting, you should be able to remove any wanted folders that were previously impossible to remove.

Hope this helps!

I checked "Always show icons, never thumbnails" and selected "Don't show hidden files, folders, or drives" but still cannot delete the folder containing thumbs.db.

Tried it many times in a row now, each setting separately and both together. Nothing works.

> If it doesn't work then the only option is to temporarily turn off thumbnails so you can delete the folder.

This sounds intuitive but also then i cannot delete the folder. Which is strange?

I used process explorer to search for the processes with open handles to that folder and it shows explorer.exe, nothing else.

It wasn't; now it is. No difference :(