My problem is that I have 5,000 files on my desktop.  when I try to send them to trash, a little flag pops up that says

“Some of the items you are moving are in use by another application.  Moving the items can cause problems with the application using them.  Are you sure you want to move these items?”

I can then choose Stop, Continue or Skip.

Sometimes the message is that the file is in use by OS X

I would choose continue, but I would have to do it 5000 times.  I can do it one item at a time, but there are 5,000 of them!

It is a long story, but let’s just say I am a recent refugee from Windows and I did not understand/forgot how the trash works and was attempting to drag files out of the trash when my finger slipped and they reached my desktop.  You cannot see most of them, but they show up when I click on apparently empty desktop space.  They are mainly mp3 files that seem to have zero bytes, so I am not quite sure what they are.

I have repaired the disk, repaired permissions, used disk warrior, and reinstalled Leopard, but nothing seems to make any difference.