amenki wrote:
A full restore, initiated from within iTunes, and re-sync finally removed an expired movie that I had been stuck with for over a week.
That's what I ended up having to do- a full iPhone restore.
This time around, it was the oddest behavior I've seen yet. 15 hours after the rental movie expiration time, the entire GB+ disk space was still blocked out. If I clicked on the iTunes "Movie" entry, indented under the iPhone in the left sidebar, I could see the movie title, grayed out, even though nothing appeared under the iPhone "Movies" tab.
After another syncing attempt, the "Video" portion of the capacity "thermometer" display finally shrank back to normal, but the "Other" segment went from <200MB to well over a GB -- obviously the space was still blocked out, but just moved to a different storage category. Bizarre.
At this point, I finally threw in the towel and nuked the thing. A full restore returned my iPhone to normal. If I'd been on the road, this would not have been possible, because my iTunes library is on an external HD.
It's worth noting that my iPhone is plain vanilla 1.1.3. I've never jailbroken it, or done anything unorthodox. I never wanted to hassle with a non-standard configuration, and still I end up with this bizarre behavior.
I've already submitted a bug report. It doesn't seem that lots of people are complaining though- is it because they aren't renting, or they're deleting manually before expiration? Apple needs to fix this- I'm tired of futzing with it...