Remove hard link when target is locked by system process

Question

I've created a hard link (not symbolic link) Arial.ttf in my user directory using the Git for Windows GNU tool ln.exe and Bash. The link points to the system font C:\Windows\Fonts\arial.ttf.

ln /c/Windows/Fonts/arial.ttf ~/Fonts/Arial.ttf

The Windows font file and (for some reason) my link, are constantly locked for use by csrss.exe, which is a process described by Microsoft Answers as:

...the user-mode portion of the Win32 subsystem (with Win32.sys being the kernel-mode portion). Csrss stands forclient/server run-time subsystem and is an essential subsystem that must be running at all times.

Hence, I assume it is impossible to kill the process without risking serious stability issues, and the link file cannot be deleted while locked.

How can I get rid of it?

Answer 1

The simple solution was to reboot into safe mode with command prompt, and remove the files using the command line.

I also wrote a wrapper function for ln so that I can use mklink to make Windows symlinks with the command ln -s.