Problems emptying the trash

I just got my iMac yesterday (and loving it so far with the exception of the odd hiccup) but something has me totally stumped.

I've been sorting through my files from my external hard drive while copying everything over and deleted a load of stuff. I managed to delete everything in the trash can apart from 1 folder which tells me I don't have "sufficient privileges". As far as I can see the folder is totally empty. I thought I'd putting it back on the external hd and delete it from windows but of course, everytime I try it just creates a new copy of it.

Is there something stupidly obvious I should be doing?

What's the folder title? Looks like you have accidently moved a system folder into trash, or it could be locked.

The folder is called "Desktop2". It isn't locked (I managed to work out how to check that when I couldn't delete some others because they were). I'd been using it on my external hd for the backup of all my old desktop's documents.
It's got 2 empty folders in it called "My Pictures" and "My Videos" which were backups of the folders of the same name on my PC. I can't touch them either. It deleted all the other folders in there with no problem.

I managed to delete "Desktop" (my laptop backup which had all the same folders and things inside) no problems so I'm baffled.

Have you tried a secure Trash empty? Normally if something say you don't have the priveleges you get asked for your admin password before proceeding.
Seems a little odd I agree.

I have tried it. It still tells me I don't have permission. It never asks for the admin password when I'm trying to do this.

Try restarting and then empty trash, just to see.

I tried that already too. No luck. Thank you for trying to help though! It's appreciated.

Troubleshooting permissions issues in Mac OS X

has a section titled Emptying the Trash

PLEASE read the section and understand that when it says to open terminal and type sudo rm -rf you NEED to specify the trash file names that are pointed to elsewhere in the section.

You could try removing from the command line.

Before you attempt this, please be very careful to note what you are doing. Many, many people screw up their systems because they get "command happy" and execute commands that mean nothing to them.

First off, the trash folder on your machine is just that, a folder. It can be found at ~/.Trash. (~ is shorthand for /Users/<username>/)

1. Open up Terminal.app (/Applications/Utilities).
2. Type: 3. Type: You should see the contents of your Trash on screen

4. Type: Make sure you are in the ~/.Trash directory when you do this (that is what the cd command is for: cd = change directory).

If you feel nervous doing this, backup before you do this (always a good idea before you do something new). You should have no problems though if you ensure that you execute that last command in the ~/.Trash directory. The "rm -rf" command removes (rm) the files recursively (r) and forces (f) it.

EDIT: Dysfunction beat me to it.

Ok, I finally plucked up the courage to do this after scaring myself silly reading the warnings. I'm not the most technical and script minded person.
Now, I may have done it wrong somehow (I tried the 1st link and then vansmith's version) but it won't work. The first link (where I drag the files over) gave me a message of "this operation is not permitted".