Monday, May 31, 2010

WinZip: Network ZIP file locking issue

Issue: Trying to delete WinZip files from a network share can sometimes cause an error:"Error Deleting File or Folder - Cannot Delete [filename]: It is being used by another person or program."

Steps tried to resolve issue:
Determined issue is on multiple computers and under different user accounts.
Determinied issue is only if WinZip is installed and associated with zip files.
"Unlocker" says there is no program locking the zip file, when it says "file in use". In some cases it says explorer.exe is the culprit.
Determined that long path name was not the issue.
Removed Antivirus and the issue still occured.
Tried to delete using both UNC and drive name - same issue.
Tried using shares on other servers - same issue.

In the end, used Sysinternals Process Monitor to determine if there were any locks - which I couldn't find any. I then used Process Explorer to see what processes were running. Because I knew Explorer.exe was the process that locked it (unlocker had returned this a couple of times), I had a browse through the handles under Explorer.exe process. One such process was WZSHLSTB.DLL. I went through the registry and found the shell extension location under the following location:

[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\CLSID\{E0D79305-84BE-11CE-9641-444553540000}\InProcServer32]@="C:\\PROGRA~1\\WINZIP\\WZSHLSTB.DLL"

After deleting this key, the WinZip context menu disappeared, but the issue also disappeared. This led me to believe that WinZip must be the culprit. I went through the WinZip Configuration settings to see what might cause a lock on the file on network drives.

Solution:
And this is where I found the solution...

A couple of options caused WinZip to do some analysis of associated zip files when the mouse hovered over the file, or the file was right clicked to display the context menu. These options are:

Configuration --> Explorer Enhancements --> Display comment tool tips for Zip files: On other drives (eg. network drives)
Configuration --> Explorer Enhancements --> Check for self-extracting CAB files: On other drives (eg. network drives)

After turning off the first of these configuration items, the issue did not reappear.

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