Hello Mark, I wish you a nice day!

 ML> under win9x (and i assume ME) files are deleted by altering the first
 ML> character to a special character.

        Been there a few years ago. I remember ! The days when we
  had full control on the files/folders in our systems. Oh well !

 ML> but it must be done very quickly... the problem is that the system, as
 ML> it is now, writes data to the drive at any time... this means that, at
 ML> any time, it may overwrite recently deleted files.

        Not the case here, Mark, I was right in there, in DOS, as
  soon as I saw the file was gone. I saw an old one but not the
  0wk.rep.

 ML> HTH in the education and/or remembrances...

        In the remembrance realm today. I had done this when
  things were easier. Mind you, I am not complaining about today's
  complexity. I have a little control over this...eg:

  I extracted a Larousse dictionary ( French ) from the french CD
  of Office 97 and was using it greatly. After a while, it refused
  to run, said: Can not find articles files. I was running from
  the C:\ HD where I had copied the required folders into its own
  folder called Larousse. I ran the CD then and still the same
  result. Ah ! ah ! a candle was lit. I tried the CD into another
  system that had never seen this dictionary and it ran. Back to
  the first system and into Regedit where I deleted all references
  to Larousse and now it runs. Methinks that there is a small
  module that counts the numbers of access and locks it up after
  I do not know how many.  See, I have a little control over this.
  This works now on my four systems. The CD access is slow but
  from the HD, it is more or less instantaneous.

        I hope that I did not bother you with this.

___ Blue Wave/DOS v2.30
--- Platinum Xpress/Win/WINServer v3.0pr5