Windows 7: Endless supply of directories. Unable to delete! please help

You should NEVER have more than one antivirus INSTALLED, even if you do not run it.

I know that but the problem I've found is that whichever security programme (AV) you choose, another programme will find something the first programme has missed. I'll un-install them anyway.. right now AVG is the only one I use really anyway.

Is there a way of reset the security permission's to default (when the root and subfolders) were created ?
I've had no end of problems with permissions when moving files around and such. although I've never encountered this issue before at all..

If this is on a drive other then the Windows system drive then I doubt it is a permissions problem.

Go head and Take Ownership of the ROOT of that drive.

If permissions for everything contained on that drive were incorrect, surely I wouldn't be able to delete other files?

I've tried changing the permissions on folder and subfolders effected and still no success.


this is how it appears


F:\77\7\7\7\7\7\7\7(1)7(2)7(3)...... upto 7(10) opening any of these would then look like this
F:\77\7\7\7\7\7\7\7\7(1)\7\7\7\7\7\7\7\7\7\7.... so it goes on.

I thought the permissions problem would be the "main" folder (77) and it's subfolders.

Thanks

rob

He's not running multiple AV's. MBAM, Webroot Anywhere and Spybot are on-demand scanners.

Still, only one scanner.

I disagree, I have the professional version of malware bytes and Vipre running at the same time. Malwarebytes does not conflict with vipre or viceversa.

Installed is one thing and active is another. I think that your advice might be confusing.

Rich

I am curious, what was the source of this information? Why not have more than one AV installed, if it is only used on-demand?

The only caveat about having two or more AV programs on a computer is to limit real time monitoring to only one. Antivirus programs do not usually play well together, and running two at the same time will often lead to one singling out the other as a virus, or in some cases, even cause file corruption. Plus running two apps can really eat up system resources. However, there are benefits to having two apps; updated definitions in one may not be identified by the other, so protection may actually be enhanced.

Yeah, I was talking about real-time monitoring
Whoops :P Guess I slipped up over there...

I'd run a disk check (go in My Computer, Rightclick on the drive, select "properties", then go in the "tools" tab, the first in that list is the disk check button, after you clicked on it tick both boxes in the popup, then off you go).
Isn't the first time something like that (endless nested folders too long to be deleted) is detected as filesystem error and gets nuked by diskcheck.

If that fails and you positively don't care of what is in there, make an ubuntu live cd, boot from it, chose to not install it on the machine, after it loaded everything navigate to the drive with the folders, delete the folders.

If you don't like linux you can grab a partition tool like EaseUS partition master home, then you can resize the hdd's only partition down to minimum possible, then you create a new partition in the unallocated space, then from My Computer you copy all the data to the new partition (leaving the nested folders there), then you delete the old partition and enlarge the new partition to fill all unallocated space.