error message when emptying trash

when I try to empty the trash on my mbp, it gives me an error message saying that the item cannot be deleted because it is currently in use but it really isnt... anyone know how to fix this? thanks.

have you tried going to the apple icon at the top left and going to force quit and see if its in there? or sometimes you need to open find and at the side next to your hard drive and mobile me it will need ejecting hope this is helpful? im not an expert but its a couple of things to try

A restart usually solves this problem

- Simon

Are the files in the trash coming from a USB device that is no longer connected ?
Are you running bootcamp and have deleted files inside Windows ?

Cheers ... McBie

i have done the restart and they are still there and there is no force eject option on the apple menu. the items were downloads that i had from the internet and the weird thing is that they are shown with that circle with the line across you know what i mean? if there are other items in the trash and i empty it, it'll give me the error message but the other items do get deleted... any other suggestions?

thanks for your help guys!

i have done the restart and they are still there and there is no force eject option on the apple menu. the items were downloads that i had from the internet and the weird thing is that they are shown with that circle with the line across you know what i mean? if there are other items in the trash and i empty it, it'll give me the error message but the other items do get deleted... any other suggestions?

thanks for your help guys!

okay so i figured it out... for some reason the applications had some traces of the programs running on the background.... since i didnt know what or how to view these traces, i just used the sudo rm -rf ~/.Trash command, which creates a new directory for the trash and deleted whatever traces of that program were left behind.