Maybe if setup.exe were a shell script, then the author would have fixed his mistake. Anyway, when one upgrades from a down-level version of Internet Explorer to any version greater than or equal to 4.0, said installer program, or one of its descendent processes, may complain that
Error Initializing the cache. Shutdown all programs and run scandisk or chkdsk. Delete the cache, cookies and history directories in your windows directory and then restart IE. If the problem persists reinstall IE.
If one then attempts to delete those files, and can’t, because Access is Denied. You Don’t Have Permissions or the File is in Use
, then one may want to find and kill the process which has the file handle open.
Thanks to Mark Russinovich of SysInternals, this is easy. His Handle program displays a list of open files, much like lsof(8) does on *U?X systems. It is essential.
But, Microsoft, you wrote when this problem first surfaced, on Windows 95, that
The presence of one or more of these files prevents Runonce from creating the Temporary Internet Files, Cookies, or History folder that Microsoft Internet Explorer needs to store cached data.
I don’t suppose it occured to y’all to test for the existence of those files before attempting to create them? Or, at the very least, correcting it so that the problem might only apply to that particular release?
No? I didn’t think so.