Deleting the undeletable

I have a couple of Macs and a PC, networked using Ethernet to a Time Capsule. The main computer is a Mac mini and on this Mac, the Trash always has something in it. If I try to get info on these items they disappear and the Trash is then empty until it’s selected again, at which point they come back and the Trash shows it’s got something in it again. Also, if I try to view the items in the Trash window as icons I can't see them, but it says that they’re there. I didn’t notice this problem before I used the other computers to delete items from the Store/ Time Capsule; are they some sort of extension alias left over from deleting files over the network?

I’ve tried ‘Secure Empty Trash’ and all other methods mentioned on forums, but they’re still there; I even tried restarting with the Trash empty, but as soon as I select the Trash icon they come back. It’s not a real problem, but it’d be nice to know what’s going on! Phil Hickey Looking at the screenshots you supplied, it’s clear that they have some disallowed characters in their names. In fact, they’re made almost entirely of disallowed characters. Files and folders with slash, question mark and quote characters can behave very unpredictably in OS X, so it isn’t surprising that you can’t delete them. But you should still be able to rename them. Just change their names to something safe, like ‘temp1’ and you’ll be able to trash them.