I recently got sent a zip file for a project I was working on, I saved it to a thumb drive, and later extracted it and opened it up. As luck would have it, there were some files in there with insanely long names, invalid characters, and dozens of other no-no's that Windows 7 didn't care for. No matter what I tried, even the command line wouldn't delete all of them (that's a first)! I still had a couple remaining. Then I remembered that Linux doesn't have the same issue with long file names or with the funky characters. Since I couldn't move the file off the thumb drive, I instead booted into Ubuntu with the thumb drive plugged in and was able to easily remove the files, and all was well.
So say you don't have a dual boot setup, just Windows, what then?
You can just install Linux on a thumb drive (I recommend Lubuntu for this as it's lightweight and easy to use), and when you start up the computer go into your boot options and choose to boot from the thumb drive. Once Lubuntu is loaded you can use the file manager to go onto other drives and delete files with bad/invalid names that you had trouble removing in Windows.
If you haven't tried Lubuntu, it's a great spin on Ubuntu but using LXDE, which is a lightweight desktop environment. I've been really happy with it so far in all my tests.
Anyway, just another couple of ways you can get rid of files that won't delete in Windows 7 if all else has failed you. Having a Linux distro on a thumb drive is never a bad idea as it can come in handy for a lot of things.
