Help for troublesome program uninstallations

[Lieutenant_Dan 0]

In the company I work for, I assist our employees with home computer issues, since we want them to be as knowledgeable about their personal system as their use of our system.  From time to time, and it has even happened to me, I have mistyped a url, or installed a program advertised as free to use on the Internet, when instead it happened to be malware, or ransomware.  But unless it is a boot sector form of attack, which is very hard to accomplish under Windows 10, otherwise I would not even be writing this with all the malware, etc in circulation, one can remove ransomware, which is especially important, and keep it from holding your system hostage.

If you even suspect you have ransomware and it comes up repeatedly when you open your browser, do not shut down your PC.

You need to identify the executable they have attacked, rename it, and if a core Windows file, reinstall that file.

If you just try to delete the executable or files they have locked, you will be told that you cannot, the file is in use.

IOBit unlocker is a tool that was recommended to our engineers, which allows you to access such files, and either delete them or rename them--I always recommend renaming an executable file to something that cannot be excuted (i.e. change exe to ex***, com to com**, dll to dll** etc)

A safe program I have tested this on since I am a casual simmer and more frequent ultralight pilot, I was taught by one of the members here, was Xplane11.  Xplane11 creates a locked log.txt but it just so they can help you if you report of think you have found an issue.  It is simply a text file with append privileges that Xplane holds while it is running.  So if you try to delete it, of course you will be told you cannot.

That is exactly the purpose of IOBit Unlocker, because sometimes a program can hold your system if it has an unexpected abort, and in rare instances, even Ctrl/Alt/Delete will not work until you close the file that is being held.

I hope this is of some help, our best practices competitors have also alerted us about this since we share information that might help our competitors in case of a system wide outage, often caused by cyberattacks on the software we share in the business industry.

Michael (btw, I am not mocking Forrest Gump), Dan was my uncle and served in the 40's and 50's, that is why my stage name as I like to call social media names is LieutenantDan_813, the 813 being the birthday of a significant other in our extended family.