Cannot delete file. Says "Item Not Found Could not find this item Verify this item's location and try again."

I buy a lot of Baen ebooks.  I have a folder in Public Documents called Ebooks.  I usually have no problems unzipping the files and placing in that author's name file and creating a new folder named for the book.  But at some point something screwy happened.  Lots of my books appeared in My Documents file with every file in the book listed.  Literally hundreds of files. All of them begin with numbers so I either have to search for the document file or wade through pages of number files to get to my files with beginning with names. I started moving them to the Recycle Bin.  For many of the files that worked fine as long as I did not delete too many at a time.  However,  many of the folder titles were not deleted and are still listed in My documents file.  All of these files are HMLT Firefox files.  When I try to delete the file again it tells me that file is no longer located in My Documents and it can not find it. The files are empty according to their properties and file size listed in the My Documents file view.  Since these files in Public Documents are in subfiles about six folders deep. I would not think that would be the problem.  All the chapter files are still properly located in Public Documents. 

Since these title files are all Firefox files I don't think I can put them in WordPad or Notepad.  My WordPerfect will import HMTL files. Since the files are empty I have been hesitate to try that for fear it will screw up my WordPerfect.  How do I convince Recycle to remove the names of these folders?

<Note: Skip to the third paragraph if  you don't care to read a long introduction in mediocre English >

Hello fellow commiserators! At least for me this issue has been a misery for years now and I have spent more than 30 hours on this (notice the unit is hours, 'cause in days is too much to want to recall) trying all different ways to get rid of these files. The frustrating thing is that I finally can't be sure what has solved my problem and I don't have a solid answer, however I signed up only to review my experience for anyone that will be hopefully helped.

My case was a bit complicated, since the stubborn files were located in an external hdd (in particular the WD My Book World Edition), which functions like a NAS drive, is formatted in NTFS and has probably some drivers in order to communicate both with windows and macs. I'm saying this for a few reasons. First, I tried to delete these files in both platforms (mac and windows, but finally the success came while experimenting in the windows part via Parallels). Second, because of the type of the HDD I was never sure about the permissions and stuff every time I was trying an approach and further this led in need of workarounds, in order to access the  files by the command prompt (at least in windows) or check/repair the disk. Moreover, the creation/mutation of the discussed files into these annoying ones and the error messages, when trying to do an operation with them, could be probably related. Finally, the fact of ejecting the drive (not exactly though, but I told you, for me it has been complicated) itself, did play some role to the outcome.

The files that would not go away were some ._Thumbs.db, although I believe I had problems with a couple of more file types before, like with some sort of backup files of incomplete html saved files, but this happened more than a year ago (at that time I just gave up), still with the same drive. I virtually tried hundreds of methods and alternatives, as well as all the ones described within the pages of this thread, without success. However, the last attempt, after which I saw those files disappearing, was to use this method, similar to the .bat file method mentioned above with one folder. Although by following the instructions, there was no obvious result, I read something in the comment, which lead me to disconnect the image, where those files were located, and by reconnecting it, I found out that the stubborn files were gone and the parent folders could be deleted. The reason I am not sure, if it was the solution, which did the trick, is because, from what I understand, it is supposed that the solution is applied on the folder in which the .bat file is put, however, after I reconnected to the image I could delete more folders, previously impossible to erase due to these files, and in which, I mean, I didn't put the .bat file. Related to the speciality that the type of the HDD introduces, I would like to add that, although I don't have the knowledge to realize what is what exactly, I can access the drive from the windows part, both when mounted as an external shared volume or as a network computer,  while the same time is also mounted in the mac's part. I was experimenting by network computer access. Maybe the Parallels virtual concept makes the whole thing even more manifold, the result however is that, after all, I am not totally sure what I could securely call the solution method. Also, I found another problematic folder in another image/partition of the HDD, I repeated -I believe- the method and it worked, but unfortunately I didn't come across to more of these files afterwards to be able to draw some more precise conclusions.

I understand that the above makes normally little sense and only if someone had the same setup could probably have a clue, of what I'm trying to say, but I was so frustrated, with all those different ways I tried, that I'm just pleased I could managed to delete them, when everything else seemed impossible, in terms that the ghost files were obviously there, but I couldn't access them, since they were supposed to be missing. Believe me (like it's not obvious already :)), I could go on to even more details, like with the wordpad method, where I also had the issue of seemingly delete the file, but it was only seconds later that the file was reappearing or all of my tries with software like Unlocker and Delinv or even the various force delete commands AND the combination of the above in the hope of deceiving what ever force had been keeping these damn files alive. However, I will leave it you to decide, if you would like to ask more from this kind of stories...

Try this download, found from sevenforums

try delinvfile DelinvFile - Utility for Deleting Invalid Files and Folders

This worked perfectly, PetekeMojela! Unlocker did not work for me, but Delinvfile highlighted the problematic file in red and it was a breeze.

The font is a bit ugly (it uses one of those old Windows bitmap ones) but the important thing is it works!

I also had the same problem, as I was not able to do anything on these files (2 - Total 1.5 GB Space). Tried all most all the options, dir/x, showing extn and creating the same file from notepad, nothing worked for me unfortunately. Even I had AVG AV in my PC, thinking in mind that "Permanently Shred with AVG" option :), but the option itself was not available, but I found "7-Zip" on the right click menu, which gave me the option "Open Archive" (Crazy), I tried it, was able to see the files listed, was able to move the files as well, but not able to delete. What I did was, moved these files to an external flash drive & formatted it !!!!!!! (saved 1.5GB space)