“Could not remove the old plugin” – help I cannot fix this

That rm -r... is only if you have shell access to your host and in most cases host’s don’t provide that ability.

If you need to remove a folder use FTP. Filezilla FTP makes it very easy to do something like that.

.I have the same problem.

My additional problem are permissions. The files are owned by nobody, and neither my ftp nor my telnet can change these files (any advice for that situation?)

I really need to run the upgrade via the normal upgrade via wordpress.

2 additional questions on that
1) I want to use Secure FTP but it does not work (filezilla works all right with secure ftp)

2) I want to understand how these upgrades via wordpress work. They actually download onto my home computer and then transfer onto my server? It would be MUCH faster and MUCH more efficient if everything got downloaded directly onto the server

3) who owns the files upgraded by wordpress? the web server? or the ftp login (if that owns it, that would explain why nothing can be deleted as in my case the files are owned by nobody, the apache webserver)

Downloading update from https://downloads.www.ads-software.com/plugin/simple-tags.1.7.4.4.zip.

Unpacking the update.

Installing the latest version.

Removing the old version of the plugin.

Could not remove the old plugin.

Plugin upgrade Failed.