Being able to empty the Trash of some music folders, they were big, on a
thumb drive I booted XP, went to the thumb drive root folder, deleted the
folder ../1000 or something like that, deffinetly not the two folders
placed there last night, went into the XP trash bin, it was not there. Now
in Ubuntu those unwanted folders are no longer there.

Seems like I do still need to have XP, what a shame. Cannonical are you
listening?

Last night I also tried to re-partition and format the thumb drive using
GParted to remove the lingering folders to no success.

The problem seems to have happen because I was copying two 100mb folders to
the thumb drive, then I started deleting several gig from that drive. I
realize this may be a tricky task but Ubuntu should have bulked at the
operation when it realized that two inflecting tasks were about to be
executed. Does that sound right?