A Quantum Immortal

A devilish problem I’ve had in the past week is the the Windows “System” process was locking a folder or two. This was on a build agent, and was causing problems deleting that folder as part of the build. This was all happening while I was introducing a new build type to our collection – automated system tests using Selenium – and I initially thought some voodoo in Selenium was causing the problem.

LockHunter (a 64-bit Unlocker equivalent) wasn’t able to unlock the folder (though it did well on folders locked by other processes). The problem seemed to go away after a reboot of the build agent, but then came back to haunt me. I tried asking this on SuperUser (StackOverflow’s colorful twin), but to no avail.

Well, last night I finally found the problem – my own computer had an open explorer window on one of the folders in the build server. I believe this window persisted even after an agent reboot. Closing it solved the problem, and achieved world peace.