New
#1
File deleted over a year ago still hasn't disappeared from explorer...
So I can't remember exactly when this happened, but a while ago (1-2 years?) I was downloading some files and moving them around to different folders and/or erasing stuff when something happened... I can't recall exactly what, but something may have crashed (explorer perhaps?) and when my system recovered/rebooted there was a file still sitting in my downloads folder that I had already just erased. Explorer shows it as 0 bytes, so there is no actual data there, and every time I try to delete it again it just displays a message saying "Could not find this item: The file is no longer located in C:/Users/etc/Downloads/ Verify the item's location and try again" which of course is correct because the file hasn't existed on my HDD for over a year.
I can't understand why Windows still seems to think it is there though. Clearly, some tag somewhere in the registry or whatever didn't get deleted with the rest of the data, but I am not enough of a computer guru to solve this. I built the system myself, so I am familiar enough with the steps needed to accomplish that, but the only thing I can think of to correct this issue is to just reformat the drive and do a clean install of Win 7, which I haven't done yet obviously as it's kind of a headache but may have to do it soonish anyhow. Meantime I've simply been ignoring the "file" and it hasn't been a problem. Does anyone know if there is an easier fix for this? In case it happens again I won't have to be irritated by it until my next reformat.
PS. I saw an older post on this from mid-late 2011 (which may have been around the time this happened to me coincidentally), but it was unsolved and I decided it was so old that I'd create a new thread in case someone else has new information about it! Thanks!