Then investigate with process explorer.
Only dos foldernames work correctly (8 letters)

Question wrote:

attempting to cd \warinc~1 (19 definately does not work.

In this case it would be cd \warinc~1.(19 .

Have you not tried restarting Windows yet?

I cant find anything in process explorer that is doing it, and windows wont tell me which process is causing it...

restarting windows should work, but i would rather not have to do it everytime i run dosbox...i dont think dosbox is supposed to have a left over process like this in the first place?

You can have Process explorer search for the foldername and the process locking it should come up.

Hmm, i don't see process explorer in win 7...

You have to download and install it. It's THE process tool from a company MS bought some years ago.

Thanks, i found the problem.

And what was it?

Question wrote:

restarting windows should work, but i would rather not have to do it everytime i run dosbox...

Why worry about something you've only seen happen once?

If you are running 32bit windows and have installed a game that uses securom it's possible that the securom explorer add-in is locking those 16bit executables.

Ending explorer.exe, logging out, or rebooting will remove the lock but to solve it permanently requires registry edits and never running securom games again (unless you remove the copy protection).