what is the proper way to delete or move a file or folder

[Molecule]

==== 17 july edit ====

I thought I had been doing something wrong ...

There are hundreds of "share violations" on my C: drive. By share violation I mean a hard-coded sector-addressed zero-byte entity, with file names or folder names that cannot be found or removed, that is "shared" with nothing that exists, but is declared as shared. they are hard coded sector addresses which the Microsoft defrag API refuses to move. Defragging has to occur around them.

I'm coming from 98se, and 2000 and XP is very confusing.

I had begun to wonder if, before every move or delete, I had to right-click and hold, then select "...sharing..." to observe that the file or folder was not "shared." This a private standalone that is not sharing nothing with nobody. I sometimes still get a share violation warning. I thought I was the one doing something wrong.

Then I did a fresh install of 2000 from MS hologram CD onto a clean hdd, 10 gig primary formatted FAT32 ... and there they are! Right from the outset.

Share violations are shown by freeware program, MyDefrag. Whenever the system defrag API receives a request from a defrag front end to move a file or folder, it sometimes returns a refusal. MyDefrag then marks the sector as "unmovable," even though it is a deleted or zerobyte file or folder. Microsoft doesn't care about them because these unmovable "shares" are created by their own installer.

one site suggestst that it's the MS file services API and windows explorer ... http://techinfo.laurenceholbrook.com/FolderSharingError.html. They call it an open orphaned file handle. create a folder ... create a subfolder ... copy a file to subfolder ... delete the file ... try to delete the empty subfolder or the parent folder ... share violation, and the hdd is slammed with another sector addressed zerobyte fixitude, that defragging has to interleave with. (haha)

I'd love to see TC figure out how to find these zerobyte critters ... a program would probably have to poll the defrag API to see where it answers with a refusal, then mark the dir or file. if it's zerobytes then feed the data to the listbox so that a user could write a reg file to delete them.

F8-Safe mode makes no difference. They're still there.

sorry for the rant ... it's not me, or TC, it's Microsoft.

I suspect desktop indexing services. A couple hundred of them also appeared on my hdd right after an install of Open Office 3.3. OO extracts lots of txt and doc files to a temp location, whereupon it may be that indexing services immediately tries to datamine them for MS (=Pentagon) indexing services. While they are being indexed, OO install moves them to their final destination, creating a share violation for the indexing process. That's my guess.

Once created, I haven't found anyone who knows how to remove them. People don't even like to talk about them. So now I know that files on a defragged disk are not really defragged, because the files are required to interleave the defrag around these permanet zerobyte zombies called share violations. The argument is that interleaving with zombies doesn't hurt disk speed all that much, since no seek times are involved (the heads don't have to do any track jumping) ... they just do a cluster jump, which may involve a full spin of the disk ...