Apologies in advance for the lengthy post.

I started out with one partition, c:, with XP Pro SP2. Then I created a new partition, onto which I installed Vista Ultimate. This installed the bootloader onto the active partition (c:). I also wanted to install linux, so I created an extended partition with two logical partitions on it, one for root and one for the swap file, onto which I installed Ubuntu 6.10. This installed Grub into the MBR. So I had Grub loading either Ubuntu or the Windows Vista bootloader, which in turn loaded XP or Vista.

I was not happy with this arrangement, so I deleted the partitions onto which Ubuntu and Vista had been installed, created a small partition at the beginning of the drive (before the XP partition), and followed the instructions at http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=260772, which worked beautifully.

Now, however, I have a file and a folder on my XP partition left over from the Vista bootloader: "Boot" (a hidden folder) and "bootmgr" (a hidden file). Trying to delete these from either XP or Vista results in a permission error. I can rename them, however, and renamed them to "Boot1" and "bootmgr1", to ensure that Vista and XP would load properly without them, which they both did. I tried setting full control permissions to my account in XP, which had no effect. The control permissions are grayed out for these two in Vista, even logged in as Administrator (after having enabled the adminisrator account).

I've also tried booting into NTFS 4 Dos 1.4 from Hiren's BootCD. Now, this is particularily curious:

del bootmgr1
"are you sure?" y
"file not found"

This perked my interest, since at first the system seems the file, and asks me to confirm deleting it, but then tells me the file isn't found. So I tried the following:

del bootmgr
"file not found"

I believe the error is stemming from some sort of encryption in the files, since NTFS 4 Dos can obviously read the files, it just can't delete it, and it doesn't really know why. The same occurs in Vista logged in as Administrator through cmd.exe.

I've also tried using my XP CD's recovery console: no such luck. When logged into the XP installation, it tells me the file cannot be deleted. And I can't log into the Vista installation through the XP recovery console at all: at first, since I did not recall setting an administrator password during the installation, I used a blank password. I also tried my own user's password (which has administrator privileges). So I figured it must be set to some preconfigured password, and enabled the Administrator account through Vista, set the password to "admin", and tried again. The system continues to return incorrect password.

This is getting more and more annoying and, although I realize the presence of these two objects doesn't actually affect anything, I am considering formatting the partition and performing a fresh install of XP. I've looked around on forums, but the only advice I can get is for situations where the user wishes to delete Vista entirely. I do not wish to do so; I only wish to remove these two objects. Any suggestions/advice are greatly welcome.

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