So, I've been enjoying playing the classic game Merchant Prince, or the Microprose iteration of it, Machivavelli: The Prince. It's one of the most enjoyable strategy games I ever played, which handles both economic/mercantile strategy as well as simulates the politics of the Roman Church and the politics of the Doge's palace in Venice.

Last night, I meant to make a shortcut to the executable, prince.exe, but I accidentally made a copy of the executable on the desktop. When I try to delete the executable from the desktop, even in safe mode, and consistiently after multiple reboots, I get an error message saying that it is in use by another user, or by a program.

I cannot imagine that any programs at all are somehow using prince.exe on my desktop, and the OCD freak in me really wants to delete it from my desktop. Does anyone have any ideas or tips?

Switch to a Mac?

Then it would be even harder to run 10 year old PC apps!

Use Unlocker.

http://ccollomb.free.fr/unlocker/

It is one of the most useful Windows utilities in existence.

Well you asked for a way to delete .exe files. My ideas works; however it does introduce other problems.

Success! I was able to delete prince.exe. For some reason explorer.exe was using it.