emptying trash hangs

Try a secure delete. Open Trash and press Secure Empty Trash, in Finder menu

Select  ▹ Force Quit... from the menu bar, then select Finder and press return. From the Finder menu bar, select Finder ▹ Preferences ▹ Advanced and uncheck the box labeled Empty Trash securely. Try again to empty the Trash. If you still have problems, follow the instructions in this support article:

You can't empty the Trash or move a file to the Trash

If your .Trash folder is actually deleted then just log out and back in. It should be recreated.

I'm having a problem deleting one file - it's a .dv file of about 23GB so I would really like to get rid of it. Originally tried to 'secure empty trash' and it hung up. Then tried regular and it did the same. It sometimes tells me it's in use - even after relaunching the finder (Force Quit) and restarting. Still hangs up. I tried to go to the link you mentioned to get that article, but Apple said it couldn't find the article. Can you point me in a better direction, or perhaps post the relavent portions in a reply?

Thanks

Very helpful, solved my problem! Thank you so much!!

Jeff,

Some solutions here.

http://www.thexlab.com/faqs/faqs.html

Hope this helps