Can't Delete Home Directories

[Michael Murphy]

An admin in our enterprise deleted a collection of AD user
accounts. When we then tried to delete the associated home
directories we get an error message saying "Can't access
My Pictures the file may already be in use by another
application." When I try to take ownership of the
directories I first get an "Access denied" message then
a "Disk may be full or write protected" error, though the
disk is not write protected and there is plenty of space
on the volume.

It won't let me change permissions or take ownership of
any of the user directories. I'm wondering if that's
because the current owner is an unknown SID, since the
associated account has been deleted. If that's the case an
authoratative restore of AD might be in order, but isn't
there some other way?

Why the my pictures directory is in the home folder is
unclear to me. There is no folder redirection policy at
any level of my AD design (Though it is not impossible
that someone might have created such a policy for the now
deleted OU in question).

Any ideas you might have would be of great help. Thanks.

 

[Steven Umbach [MVP]]

Hi Michael. Here is a link to a KB article and another link that may be of
help. As an aside I have had similar problems and I do not know why this
worked but in a lot of situations when I could not delete a folder having
errors similar to yours, I went to properties/general/advanced where there
is a setting for "folder is ready for archiving". Just for the heck of it I
unchecked that setting and hit apply. After that I was able to delete the
folder [with proper permission]. In some cases if that setting was not
selected for a folder, I would select it hit apply and then unselect it
again and would be able to delete folder. In other situations where I was
unable to delete a folder, if I started at the bottom most subfolder and
started deleting from there I was able to delete everthing - just a little
more work. --- Steve

http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=320081
http://www.kellys-korner-xp.com/xp_d.htm#del