Undeletable AVI files in WindowsXP

Stupid-ass Microsoft.

I have had these AVI files on my disk that I have been unable to delete for weeks… I did some hunting and apparently there is some bug in this shmedia.dll that causes some AVI files (possibly only Divx ones?) to be undeletable. I found a few hacks that let me delete the files by killing explorer.exe and deleting them in the shell when it wasn’t running, but I wanted to fix the actual problem and not have to work around it all the time. It turns out if you delete the following registry key will prevent the offending DLL from loading:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Classes\CLSID\{87D62D94-71B3-4b9a-9489-5FE6850DC73E}\InProcServer32

I have no idea if this has any negative ramifications, and mucking around in the registry isn’t for the feint of heart, so YMMV and don’t blame me if your computer explodes.