I was experiencing long delays when attempting to delete files from my laptop or external USB drives. For example, deleting a 1.5 GB file would start a continually rotating flood bar of deleting. It would run for 30 minutes or more before I would give up and click the cancel bar in the dialog window.
The canceling would also present a never ending flood bar lasting 15 minutes or more. After doing some research regarding an early Vista problem with file moves and deletions I looked at several configurations but could not find the problem.
Finally realized during the installation of PGP desktop I had enabled a secure delete (shred) feature. When I disabled the shred feature, my never ending delete processes went away.