Trash keeps locking itself up

Hi All,
I'm a new Mac user and already ran into the nasty Empty Trash thing.
I have OSX 10.5.5 updated to the max.
The trash worked fine until I decided to try the secure delete thing.
The trash had 5 files and about 50 MB total.
The process of deleting the files never ended and I had to restart my mac.
Ever since then every files I put into the trash can cannot be deleted using the UI.
I can delete these files using Trash it / Terminal and so forth but once I put a new file into the trash I can't seem to delete it using the UI again.
I have tried deleting the ~./Trash folder and deleting the /.Trashes folder but once I restarted the Mac and they were recreated the problem came back.

I also tried to do disk check for errors and permission errors and fixed everything that the software said it could fix.

What else can I do? (I have no problem using the terminal or opening cryptic files as I am a former Linux user)

Well good news - I managed to solve this problem.
Well I noticed a strange thing.
Using the terminal I saw that the list of files looks like this:
drwx------@ 6 XXXXX staff 204 נוב 29 21:48 ?.?Trash
Now the strange thing is that doing cd ./.Trash worked just fine and also all the
rm -rf ./.Trash/* commands
since I'm new to mac I assumed that this is how the Trash dir might be on mac but then I just decided to change this since it looked too strange.
A quick
mv ./?.?Trash ./.Trash made the trash disappear for a few seconds and then reappear and now it works back again.
Spooky start to my Mac experience.
Anyway I thought this should be logged here since I couldn't find anyone referencing this kind of problem.
See ya.