OS X :: Trash Is In Use / Cannot Be Opened

I was about to lose my mind.A couple of days ago I found that I couldn't empty my trash.I kept getting the error message in the title of this post.I have a program called "Smart Trash"...nope.I tried "Super Empty Trash"...nope.I ran some terminal commands followed by a Repair Disk Permissions.Option-Empty...nope.I booted VMWare Fusion / XP, and did a CHKDSK.I tried creating an empty folder and dragging the files (17 of them) into the empty folder, then deleting the empty folder, but my computer wouldn't let me pull the files out of the trash and move them to the new folder.I put the files into A Better Finder Rename and tried to rename them.Then, I did something that you'd never think would solve the problem, but for some reason it did.

I opened up the trash, did a Cmd-A to select all, then a Cmd-I to find out how (collectively) big all of these files were and when my Mac tried to access the files to see their size, they disappeared.
I have no idea why that was the thing that worked, but my Trash is empty and the paper in my trash icon is gone.Just thought I'd share this because I know there are others out there that have tried everything as well. I'm not promising this will work for you, but what have you got to lose, right?