Unable to Compact a VHD Due to a File System Limitation

While trying to compact a vhd that had been (unbeknownst to me) generating huge quantities of log files I recently ran across the rather strange “Unable to Compact a VHD Due to a File System Limitation” error:

I found a couple things to try thanks to Google:

• vssadmin delete shadows /all
• KB982210

But none of those worked.  After a fair amount of digging on the net and around my VM I concluded that I had a grand total of 1280MB in VSS copies stored in my VHD itself.  Then I found post by The Angry Technician!  Perfect!!  Diskshadow is the answer.  One simple command to execute, 5 seconds to wait, and everything was good again:

diskshadow

list shadows all (if you want to see them all)

delete shadows all (this was specific to my case, you may want to be selective about which shadows to delete)