I've been in exactly this situation on production (with a panicked operator on the other end of the phone and any number of other applications that would've bee

I've been in exactly this situation on production (with a panicked operator on the other end of the phone and any number of other applications that would've been brought down). On either platform, you end up needing to kill the offending program to release the resource. But at least on Windows you know it! On Linux you can unlink the file, realise the problem still exists, and now you've lost an avenue for figuring out the real problem.