Question for a friend :

[Moose on the Loose]

My friend has a small problem :

he has an icon on his desktop (I don't know which one, I'll ask him if you think it matters) and he can't remove it because it says the process is being used. Even when he shuts down all his programs and pull out his internet cable (I don't see how that would do anything, but hey, it's not me) it still doesns't want to be deleted. Is this some sort of spyware? I told him to run adaware and spybot, but it doesn't seem to have helped.

Moose

[aym]

Did he try to delete it in safe mode? What's the name of the icon?

[bailey]

I think you will need to find out just exactly what the icon is and what it is used for (program )
usally you can just right click in it and it should give you the option to exit.
after you exit the program, you should be able to delete it.
doing so will not remove the program, just the icon.

[Moose on the Loose]

The programme is called FCLogin. He says it's not a shortcut. I'll tell him to try to delete it in safe mode.

[bailey]

I understand that it is not a short cut.

any icon on the task bar will give you a amall menue when you right click on it and one of the options on that menu will usally be exit or close.

[Redfallon]

Originally Posted by bailey I understand that it is not a short cut. any icon on the task bar will give you a amall menue when you right click on it and one of the options on that menu will usally be exit or close.

I think it's a desktop icon, not on the taskbar. I.E. - maybe he downloaded a program to the desktop. I've had this happen before with a file/icon. I think I ended up either booting to safe mode and dropping to cmd prompt, or using a bootdisk with NTFS support to delete it. I couldn't figure out which "process" was using the file, and spybot/adaware was no help.

[glc]

If all else fails, download and use moveonboot or use the remove on boot file deleter in HijackThis.

[Moose on the Loose]

I'll tell him to try in safe mode, that should work I guess. Redfallon is right, it's just an icon on the desktop that he can't remove, and he can't determine which process is. He used ctrl+alt+del to delete all (unrequired) processes, so basically everything except explorer.exe and a couple of other necessary processes, without result.