I've been using the "FAAC 1.24.1 (FEB 1 2005) Unstable" binary which I downloaded from rarewares.org. I'm running it on Win XP SP2 with an Intel Pentium 4, 2.40GHz processor. I've been wondering if there is a bug in this version of FAAC because I am seeing the following behavior:

When the program has stopped running there are often handles left open to some of the newly encoded files, which prevent me from moving or tagging them. I.e. Windows falsely reports that the file is in use by a program. This happens in particular if I interrupt FAAC in the middle of encoding a file, which sometimes I am forced to do. I often find that I can't delete the partial aac or mp4 file because Windows reports that it is in use by another program. To make matters worse, attempts to delete the file often bring my computer to a halt, forcing me to reboot.

When I use a program such as procexp.exe it reports that there is an open file handle to the problematic aac or mp4 file in explorer.exe. Sometimes I can force the handle to terminate and then access the file, but often times I cannot. What's more frustrating is that often even a reboot won't fix the problem.

I realize that WinXP has its own bugs with regard to open handles that shouldn't be open, but I've never had this problem to this extent with other codec binaries or with previous versions of FAAC. This is why I am wondering whether FAAC might be the problem.

Has anyone else experienced this problem?

I can't see any real problems in the code, from a quick glance. The input file isn't closed if the opening of the output file fails, but I don't see that as a likely problem. On normal completion, everything appears to be closed as it should be.

Thanks for your reply john. The problem must lie elsewhere then.