I used hard links to merge duplicated files on my SSD (space is still precious) and now have a weird problem. Common files like msvcr110.dll got hard linked. Now I want to delete a program which has this file in its installation directory. But I cannot because this file (on another location) is used by a currently running application (don't know which) and windows doesn't allow me to delete this file because it's in use. I can rename the file but it still points to the same file, so not possible to delete it. Is there any way to break a the hard link of a file which is currently in use?

I currently use a trash folder where I move those files to so I can delete the directory structure of program to be deleted. But I'd like to get rid of this leftover (although it doesn't take much space as it's a hard link).