Strange icon w/ "item in use" message

[beaugard]

Greetings! New to this and happy to have found the resource.

Yesterday while at work, I went to move an MSWord file to Trash and received an error message that (paraphrase): "file cannot be deleted because it is in use." At the time, MS Word was closed so the message seemed odd.

Then I noticed this strange icon

associated with the file in question. Any thoughts?

 

[LightGear]

if you restart your computer it will clear the lock and you should be able to delete it

 

[Egidio]

That message generally appears when you copy a section or word or paragraph from the document in question. Then your Mac thinks the document is still in use. Often by simply quitting the application in question can clear the problem. If not, LightGear's suggestion will work for sure.

 

[beaugard]

Hey, thanks for the responses.
Only thing is I wasn't copying from that file when this popped up, I was trying to trash it. Would this message&icon occur if a remote user was in the file while I was trying to trash it? Can someone remotely view my desktop over a server completely without my knowledge? A colleague has a Windows machine and if/when an administrator signs onto her desktop, she gets an illuminated icon in her footer toolbar. I've never seen such an icon but have reason to believe someone may be monitoring my desktop. Is the icon and error message I describe a possible sign of this???

 

[darock]

Do you have "Windows Sharing" checked in the Sharing Pane of "System Preferences"?

 

[Egidio]

Sometimes, even though you're not directly using a document, the document can be "tied" to another document or application. It can happen, for example, with suite packages. Furthermore, if you copied something from that document, Clipboard will keep that connection until the next copying takes place. In that case, it can be hours after you'd closed the original document and you could still get the "busy" message.

 

[Lance]

I have had same problem with "fonts" in my trash CANT DELETE EM

1. how do I delete em

2. how can I avoid this in the future