I had the same problem, came here via a bit of googling to find the
answer and the unlocker theory is almost right; trouble is the file is
actually being used by the explorer process itself (this is the rather
important system process that actually controls your taskbar, desktop
icons etc) - so stopping that process means you can't delete the file
in the normal windows way as it kinda necessary to see the file's icon
to delete it...
However, the way around this is to first open up a dos window (command
prompt or 'cmd' in from start menu - run) and then also the task
manager (you can get to it by doing ctrl-alt-del).
OK, once you've got both these program running, go to the process list
tab in the task manager and kill the explorer process (the taskbar your
icons, and any explorer windows you had open will disappear, leaving
just the dos prompt window and the task manager windows, this is going
to be only temporary - don't worry - well any file explorer windows
won't come back, i think, but everything else will).
Now, in the dos prompt, go to the directory the hurl.exe file is in
(mine was on the desktop - so in XP this was c:\documents and
settings\username\desktop).. hmm, i better have a quick aside about the
dos command 'cd' for the newbies, how got lost on that last bit...
if you don't know how to get to that directory- this being the newusers
forum I guess you might not - you type the command 'cd' followed by the
name of the directory to jump to (your current one is shown to the left
of where you'll type the commands) i.e. if I was in the root directory
(get there typing 'cd \') I'd type 'cd c:\documents and
settings\myusername\desktop'. (if you don't know your username, then
look at the 'c:\documents and settings' folder in explorer firsty -
yours will be the same as one of the direcory names in there...
Ok, within the dos window your now your in the same directory as the
hurl file, type 'del hurl.exe' to delete it- hooray, but we need to get
back to normal... Type 'explorer' in the dos window and the explorer
process will start back up again (why we needed the dos promt)
everything will be back as it was except that annoying hurl.exe file
will be gone...
