DLL locked by what?

I could not upgrade WAS61 because there was a dll (WASServiceMsg.dll) is locked. This ended up stopping the install of the fix pack. This also made the autorecovery stop working. So I had to delete the entire installation of all 3 base products and start again - happy! No!!!

So I reinstalled everything and restarted the machine and tried to delete the WASServiceMsg.dll from the appserver\bin dir to ensure that the update would apply (this is what it could not do last time). I could not delete the file.

I downloaded a tool from http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb896653.aspx which is totally awesome. It shows lots of nerdy information about all of the processes that are loaded up, and allows you to search for DLLs in that information.

I found that the wmiprvse process was locking this DLL. This is a low level process which allows you get get all of the WMI information out of them. Obviously IBM is allowing the service to get information from WebSphere - but it's being locked.

known issue from IBM

Resolving the problem
If you have WebSphere Application Server running as a service to start automatically, change this to start manually. Then reboot your machine and retry the installation.

If you do not have WebSphere Application Server set to start automatically and it is already set to start manually, then reboot your machine to free the locked resource. Then retry the installation.

If you are uninstalling and then reinstalling. Reboot your machine after a successful uninstall before reinstalling.

In addition to the steps above, sometimes it is necessary to shut down the Windows Management Instrumentation service after your system has rebooted. Then retry the installation.