moving items to the trash is taking 8 hours so far; i dropped and dragged picaboo x and adobe and they appear stuck

Well you can always force shutdown your computer by pushing the power button for about 7 seconds or until it shuts down.

You might then want to try to reboot just to make sure you can. If not boot from your recovery partition and run Disk Utility to check your boot volume. You might want to do that anyway even if you can successfully reboot.

You didn't say how many files the stuff you want to delete but here's an article about trash problems:

Solving Trash Problems

FWIW, removing massive amounts of stuff by moving them to the trash and empting the trash is not the fastest operation in the world! You can use terminal to do it faster. As an example, say you have a folder with a lot of files in it, call it F. Then in terminal type sudo rm -rf followed by a space. Then in the finder click on F and drag it into the terminal window. You would then have a line that looks somthing like:

sudo rm -rf path-to-F

Hit return to erase F. You will get a prompt for your admin password because of the sudo (note, you may not need the sudo if there are no permissions problems to worry about). Your password is not echoed on the terminal as you type it.

Apple menu > Force Quit... > Finder > Relaunch

Finder > Preferences > Advanced > Empty Trash securely: uncheck

sudo rm -rf path-to-F

FYI, this is not safe for a user with no shell experience. I have quite a bit of shell experience, and I would never enter such a command under any circumstances. You need to be very, very cautious about advising people to run data-destroying commands in the shell.

First, rm doesn't need to run as EUID root in most cases. And what good is the "f" option doing? Second, what happens if the user gets as far as "sudo rm -rf /" and then accidentally hits the return key? Do you realize what will happen then? All data, possibly including backups, will be deleted.

A safer way to delete in an interactive shell (still not foolproof for a beginner) is this:

ls -d path

rm -r !$

If you've already partially deleted them, you should finish the job. It will go a lot faster if you had the secure-empty option enabled before.

I have never heard of "Picaboo X" so I can't help you with that. Your best bet would be to contact the developer.

There is no application called "Adobe," so I don't know what you were deleting. Adobe is a big software publisher with many products. It has its own support forums where you would be more likely to find answers than you would here.

One thing I can tell you is that reinstalling software is rarely the solution to any problem. That's the Windows way of thinking, which you should get away from as a Mac user.

Those instructions are wrong. If your installations of the software were out of date, all you had to do is download the latest Adobe AIR installer and run it, and download the latest version Picaboo and drag it into the Applications folder, replacing what was already there. That would have saved you 8 hours.

If the software was not out of date, then reinstalling it will almost certainly make no difference at all.