I created a Folder on a network drive, and I wanted to rename it. When I tried to do so, I get the infamous message:'The action can't be completed because the folder or a file in it is open in another program. Close the folder or file and try again.' I've tried and tried and tried, but without success. In the past, when this issue occurred, I made sure that the file was closed, and any web pages opened that had a link to that file were closed as well.

1. The Action Cannot Be Completed Windows 7
2. Document Is Open In Another Application

After that, I was able to rename the folder, butthis time it's not happening.I looked at the solutions provided by Robert P. (12/7/2011) on behalf of 'HowLuckyCanOneGuyBe', 'alanomaly', and 'Macintrasher', where I tried removing temp files (could not remove all of them), stopped windows from caching the thumbnails, emptied recyclebin, and stopped and restarted the explorer.exe process. None of these solutions worked.Please advise as to how to proceed from here. The goal is to rename a folder so that I am referencing report # in the folder name. Thank you.V/R,John J.

I've had success with. With this, you can search to find what process(es) have a file open, and you can use it to close the handle(s) if you want.

Of course, it is safer to close the whole process. Exercise caution and judgement.To find a specific file, use the menu option Find-Find Handle or DLL. Type in part of the path to the file.

The list of processes will appear below.If you prefer command line, Sysinternals suite includes command line tool, that lists open handles. A few examples on how to use it:. c:Program FilesSysinternalsSuitehandle.exe findstr /i e: - find all files opened from drive E:. c:Program FilesSysinternalsSuitehandle.exe findstr /i file-or-path-in-question. Just be very careful with closing handles; it's even more dangerous than you'd think, because of handle recycling - if you close the file handle, and the program opens something else, that original file handle you closed may be reused for that 'something else.' And now guess what happens if the program continues, thinking it is working on the file (whose handle you closed), when in fact that file handle is now pointing to something else.see on this topicSuppose a search index service has a file open for indexing but hasgotten stuck temporarily and you want to delete the file, so you(unwisely) force the handle closed.

The Action Cannot Be Completed Windows 7

The search index service opens itslog file in order to record some information, and the handle to thedeleted file is recycled as the handle to the log file. Total war shogun 2 steamunlocked. The stuckoperation finally completes, and the search index service finally getsaround to closing that handle it had open, but it ends up unwittinglyclosing the log file handle.The search index service opens anotherfile, say a configuration file for writing so it can update somepersistent state. The handle for the log file gets recycled as thehandle for the configuration file. The search index service wants tolog some information, so it writes to its log file. Unfortunately, thelog file handle was closed and the handle reused for its configurationfile. The logged information goes into the configuration file,corrupting it.Meanwhile, another handle you forced closed was reusedas a mutex handle, which is used to help prevent data from beingcorrupted.

When the original file handle is closed, the mutex handleis closed and the protections against data corruption are lost. Thelonger the service runs, the more corrupted its indexes become.Eventually, somebody notices the index is returning incorrect results.And when you try to restart the service, it fails because itsconfiguration files have been corrupted.You report the problem to thecompany that makes the search index service and they determine thatthe index has been corrupted, the log file has mysteriously stoppedlogging, and the configuration file was overwritten with garbage. Somepoor technician is assigned the hopeless task of figuring out why theservice corrupts its indexes and configuration files, unaware that thesource of the corruption is that you forced a handle closed.

Document Is Open In Another Application

Just to clarify, this is more likely to be a result of misbehaving 3rd party apps not using the CreateFile API call correctly than it is to be anything in Windows itself. Perhaps it's a consequence of the design of CreateFile, but done is done and we can't go back.Basically when opening a file in a Windows program you have the option to specify a flag that allows shared access. If you don't specify the flag, the program takes exclusive access of the file.Now, if Explorer seems to be the culprit here, it may be the case that that's just on the surface, and that the true culprit is something that installs a shell extension that opens all files in a folder for it's own purposes but is either too gung-ho in doing so, or that doesn't clean up properly after itself. Symantec AV is something I've seen doing this before, and I wouldn't be surprised if other AV programs were also to blame. Source control plug-ins may also be at fault.So not really an answer, but just some advice to not always blame Windows for what may be a badly written 3rd party program (something that can also happen on any other OS which has implicit file locking, but any unix based OS has shared access by default).