Cannot delete system files created from Windows 10 Media Creation Tool

f14tomcat said:

Matthew and Denis. As more pieces come together, I'm also of the mind that a clean install is in order. These issues tend to snowball after a while, and for you, Matthew, it's been a while. Too many things just don't smell quite right. You could continue chasing this down for days and not be any better off, or backup all your personal data (not the bin stuff.....), wipe all partitions of the OS, and start with a clean install. 1903, not 1803. Denis posted the tutorial link. Help with any parts of it are just a post away.

May be your best solution at this point.

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The fact you only have 1 Explorer running when there should be 2, and the Whoami not reporting "NT Authority" makes me believe the PowerRun Explorer never actually started. Which makes me believe there are permission issues with your account preventing running anything higher than Administrators Group. We could dig thru the Event Logs to verify, but it all seems to point to a clean install is in order.

Thank you. I have since updated (using update tool and not a clean install) Windows to 1903 after your highlighting I was using ver. 1803. The Windows Update issue is now resolved and I can (and have) updated with no issues.

I then tried again to open PowerRun and checked explorer.exe in task manager but there is still only one instance running. I also ran a whoami command in cmd.exe from explorer.exe in PR and get my user account ID and not NT Authority.

Oddly, I was able to delete 'some' of the bin files manually to the trash bin after Windows update to 1903 but when I went to delete the trash it again prompted for permissions to delete. I then tried to restore those files to 'bin' and it prompted for permissions yet again, but when I hit continue, it did allow me to restore them with no further issue.

In any event, I will continue with this updated version of Windows for now to see if I run into any other operating issues as this single issue does not warrant a clean install IMO. This issue appears isolated to 'system' files only as I don't have problems deleting non-system files at this time. I may change my mind if I see other anomalies though and may reach out again if I have any questions the tutorials did not cover.

Thank you again to both Denis and F14Tomcat for all your help with this!

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Just out of curiosity, I launched PowerRun and instead of launching explorer.exe, I went to the Launch Command Prompt icon on the far upper right and then put in the command 'whoami' and got 'nt authority/system. See screenshot below:



So, from PowerRun's icon for the command prompt, it appears to be functioning however, I apparently need to be one level lower in order to delete the 'bin' folder, C:\Users\m_han\Downloads\ and not C:\Users/m_han\Downloads/PowerRun>

Any further ideas on how to proceed here?

I really glad to see you successfully updated to 1903. That, by itself, is a major step.

Just to avoid any confusion. Just running PowerRun then checking whoami and the number of Explorers doesn't do much. You have to run Explorer or CMD from within PowerRun.

There are 2 .exe files with PowerRun. PowerRun.exe and PowerRun64.exe. You need to be running the PowerRun64.exe.

Try

RD /q /s BIN

My mistake, directories don't take wildcards.

Dumb question......and may sound silly.

How are you starting PowerRun?

shingdao said:

That was it! No more bin folder...thank you so much for that! I appreciate your patience.

Great!!!!!! I'm so happy to hear this!

Now, I have to give you the obligatory advice. Do an image backup of your system. It's ingrained in all of us here on Tenforums to push to do backups.

shingdao said:

Working on it now as I type!

Also marked thread as solved!

Another ..... and thank you for your patience.