Clearcase MVFS corrupts file – Cannot delete file “Invalid DOS Function”

I have clearcase 7.0.1.2 on Win2k OS.
When I built a project using Visual Studio .NET 2003, files are created in output “Release” directory which gets created under the vob. In this folder one particular file “vc70.idb” started creating problems. During further builds, VS is not able to delete this file to overwrite. My first reaction was to delete it from explorer only to find “Invalid DOS function” or such similar error message. Next step was to open CMD and try to delete this file. This too gave the same useless error message.  Due to urgency, I renamed the “Release” to “Release_somenumber”, changed output directory to my local drive and did further builds.

I got back to the problem later and there was no other way to delete this vc70.idb file. Name shows up in the explorer but just cannot get rid of these files. Our IT support guys were told about the problem and they came down, struggled for few hours and finally left saying they will escalate to IBM team. I did not wait for them because I know they will take few weeks to solve this.

So I decided to solve this myself with ever useful sysinternals tools. Solving this issue was trivial.

1. I fired up filemon.exe from sysinternals.
2. I opened explorer and tried deleting this “vc70.idb” file.
3. Stopped filemon capturing. Filemon shows the actual file location vc70.idb points to in the clearcase view. It leads to something like
“\\networkshare\csv_view.vws\.s0018\80000eabbglslvc70.idb”
4. Now it is trivial: open notepad and save the file with the same name shown by filemon in that location.
5. Go to explorer and simply delete the file!! voila!!