There are limits in how much you can delete at once. I avoid this problem
in the settings by allowing a Delete command that bypasses the rubbish bin.
It has one benefit and one drawback. The benefit is that there is no size
limit and it is much faster. The drawback is that it is permanent. I am not
sure why it worked as you described, though. To add the Delete command
which appears int he drop down menu go to Nautilus and Edit, Preferences,
Behavour tab and at the bottom will be a check box.

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?

on one occasion i couldnt delete some files off a thumb drive I reformatted it
to fat and everything works on ext3 and ext4 it hung up ?
All it said was I dont have permission to delete files only read.

Let me see if I get this. While you were trying to copy the file. You
were trying to delete it. Is that right? If so the OS was doing what it
was supposed to do. Deny access to the that file to the process that
wanted access to the already opened file. No matter how the error was
reported the result was the same. Your second process was denied access.

This reasoning can be compared to gparted being denied access to a
mounted partition or device. When you want to format a mounted
partition, you must first unmount it, otherwise The OS will assume the
process that has it's hooks is still using it, even if the only
connection is that the file system has opened it. Don't you love Linux?
I do.

MB> The problem seems to have happen because I was copying two 100mb
MB> folders to the thumb drive, then I started deleting several gig
MB> from that drive.

Multiple operations on USB connections can fall over all too easily.
Had similar problems with USB drives and have learned to do one
operation at a time - and overall it doesn't seem any slower to do the
tasks consecutively

I had about a dozen music cd's in a dozen different folders on a thumb
drive.
Then I started to copy two more audio folders to that drive.
While there were being copied, to save time, I decided to delete the music
folders.
The result was the individual songs were not there but there folders were
in the trash bin and I could not empty the bin.
It is on a FAT32 thumb drive.

I won't try that again.