Undeletable Files?

I deleted a bunch of directories on my WinXP machine and strangely enough even after emptying the recycle bin the available disk space did not change. I had turned off that system restore nonsense a long time ago, and emptied the folders again just to be sure but no cigar. 300MB that should have been freed from deleting the folders was not freed.

The answer came to me while I was writing a small utility to backup my current projects, and in the course of it's activities it built the directory structure in a treeview. There, to my amazement, was a bunch of folders in the recycler folder. (Note that the recycle bin shows empty!). Opening these folders (which had lengthy cryptic names indeed) revealed the folders I had just deleted. Writing code to nuke these was but a few seconds work.

However an easier option is there - using Nero Burning ROM. Open the explorer and navigate to Recycler. Nero will show you everything that is in in there and will let you delete them. Oddly enough, they will go to the recycle bin and appear there properly, and then you can empty the bin