seeking a stronger "nuke anything" utility

[Seeker47]

I wanted to dispose of a couple recalcitrant .DLL files from an app that had been uninstalled, but they would just not go quietly. Tried Unlocker 1.9.1, but no dice. The latest version of Process Explorer could not do it either, as these files had welded themselves to Win Explorer -- worse than the "facehugger" in ALIEN. I could get rid of Explorer, but then there goes the whole dang desktop along with it ! (Quite possibly, I'm just not sufficiently familiar with Process Explorer, so far as that goes . . . ) Anyway, my next thought was to kill the files from a boot into Safe Mode, but I don't know where you get into Safe Mode in 64-bit Win-7. Then I tried a few of the Hiren's type rescue discs I have on hand, before recalling that several of them don't boot up on this particular rig, for obscure reasons I've never quite figured out. (They all work fine on the somewhat older SN27P2 model.) Knoppix 6.7.1 Live CD did boot up just fine, however, and I used that to do the job.

Isn't there an easier way to do this ? On an older computer, I had some utility (TaskMgr-16 ?, TaskMgr-17 ?) that I think claimed to be able to kill pretty much any file, service, or process. I may have to haul that old rig out of storage to find it, though it may well be that that utility wouldn't work under much later versions of Windows, anyway.

[pchan]

By hitting F8 during boot, you should be able to get into Safe Mode. It's possible that some other application is accessing to the DLL module.

[transporterfan]

You could try FileASSASSIN.

http://www.malwarebytes.org/products/fileassassin/

[Seeker47]

You could try FileASSASSIN.

http://www.malwarebytes.org/products/fileassassin/

Thanks for that tip. Always good to discover tools I did not previously know about.
Thanks also to pchan for the W7 Safe Mode info.