Iphoto won't delete photos properly and then can only force quit to exit

I'm running the latest version of Iphoto 09. I have my library on an external drive. I was going to back up my library on discs so I thought I'd clean it up before I do. I was moving some pictures from 3 events into 1 lets say to that everything was grouped like it should be and trying to delete photos. When I tried dragging some photos from one event to another, nothing happened. It was when I clicked the arrow beside the event (to show or hide) to display the photos that they eventually moved. It wasn't like I could drag and drop and it took instantly. Also, I found some duplicates, so I selected say 4 or 5 and dragged them to the trash in iphoto. The trash had a blue ring around it but the pictures were still the photo window. I clicked on empty iphoto trash and it just sat there for a bit, then I clicked on the trash and the photos were gone. Again, I had to click on an arrow or click on events and go back for the change to take effect. I figured ok great, if I quit iphoto when I open it back up I wont have the problem. So I went to quit iphoto and could only do a force quit. When I reopened it back up, the photos hadn't been deleted and I have to do the same process over and over again. I've tried different photos and same result.

I read on this forum to rebuild your database and I did and same thing. The strange part is now I see some dotted lines around some blank pictures in some of the deletes I did from yesterday. I logged on to my wife's account on the computer to see maybe it was my user name with the problem and her's did the same thing.

The only thing I can think of would be to try hooking the drive up to the macbook pro and seeing if it does it there, but I suspect it will..

Any ideas??