Recycle Bin wants to delete WINDOWS

[suburbanhell]

Yeah, so this is an interesting one, and I haven't figured out how to fix it on my own yet aside from re-installing windows, which is an avenue I'd rather not take if possible.

I go to empty the recycle bin, and it says "are you sure you want to delete 'WINDOWS'?" -- For obvious reasons, I don't dare say yes. Any IT pros care to take a stab at this one?

[Nerfed]

Reboot.

I've encountered this also and, like you, don't dare say yes.
After rebooting, empty your recycle bin and see if it asks you again.


That makes the prompt go away for me, but I have no idea what causes it to begin with. You could also try openingyour recycle bin and manually deleting items to make sure only what's supposed to get deleted goes bye-bye.

[suburbanhell]

Ok...here's what I did yesterday to try and get rid of it:

I've rebooted several times
I've booted into safe mode
I ran Ad-Aware
I ran Spybot Search & Destroy
I ran Norton Antivirus
I ran a HJT but didn't find anything out of the ordinary
I grabbed a restore recyclebin registry and installed that.

As for "exploring" my recycle bin... there's NOTHING listed in it.

Now, upon my last couple of reboots it says "Are you sure you want to delete all of the items in the recycle bin?" -- but I'm a tad leery to do so, because upon exploring the recycle bin it's empty, so I go to try to empty recycle bin again and at that point it asks me "are you sure you want to delete 'WINDOWS'?" again.

[bpphantom]

Make sure that the standard "hide protected system files" and what-nots are all checked/unchecked as required in Windows Explorer.

[suburbanhell]

Yeah, those are unchecked, nothing should be hidden, says 0 objects, there's no mention of hidden items in the status bar...

If I put one object in, it says "Are you sure you want to delete these 2 items?" so...this is getting annoying.

[Green Tower]

If all else fails, you can go back to a system restore point.

[suburbanhell]

Yeah, it uh...sort of resolved itself because I'm an idiot. In the midst of a bunch of photoshopping I was doing yesterday I instinctively emptied my recyclebin at the end of the session and...well... c:\windows still seems to exist. I'm a tad ...apprehensive to restart my computer, but so far so good.