Although I did some experimenting with Vista, I didn't experiment with
shadowed operations or antivirus software (Vista diligently tells me I have
no antivirus software) or anything else. The open handle was held by the
"System" process, pid 4, according to the warnings in the event log.
In this bug report as in some others, Microsoft wrote a response before
closing the bug report. Microsoft said this behaviour is by design.
I haven't decided yet whether to do any more experiments with Vista after
that, but I sure won't be buying Vista. I think I never owned a computer in
which I could avoid sometimes connecting external drives to back up some
files or copy some files back from backups. In NT4 it was necessary to
close all applications and close down Windows before either connecting or
disconnecting a SCSI adapter and external drive. In Vista it's only
necessary to shut down before disconnecting. With enough service packs
Windows 2000 and XP and 2003 have become almost as reliable as NT4 was, and
97% of the time they handle external drives in a more friendly manner, so
I'm going to stick with them.
Gary G. Little said:
If a handle to the drive is open, you will not be able to remove it. Is
the external drive a target for a shadowed operation such as Ghost or some
other back up, or is it included in your AV scans?
Hmmm ... and Symantec would complain about someone elses kernel/driver
code? I am truly amused.
