I have desk top running Windoes XP. I was recently making a history of some of my old photos that were on the external drive, editing them a nd deleiting the copy as I went. When I had finished i went to the recycle bin to clear the deleted files, it managed nearly all of the except 8 which it defies to delete or restore. The message is "cannot delete thumbs.db it is being used by another person or program. Close all programs that might be using the file and try again" When I dissconnect the external drive the files dissapear, I have copied all the files onto discs but still it will not delete these files or folders. Even when i think I have cleared the files I click on delete all and it asks if I want to delete the remaining 8 folders which I can't even see. Any Ideas? I thought about clearing the remaing 20Gb of data onto discs and re formatting, do you think this might work?