Just an update on my situation, I'm still having issues with my recycle bin. I just deleted 1.5gig's worth of stuff off my c drive. I had 450megs of space before the recycle bin deletion and still have 450megs of free space.
After that I decided to delete another 300meg file. It went to the recycle bin and then I deleted it from there. It disappeared but it didn't free up any space. I check the recycle bin icon on the desktop and papers are in it as if its got files in there but they are hidden. I right click the icon and select empty recycle bin and it asks me if I want to delete 3 files that are in there, I click ok and I get the error "Cannot delete dc40 access is denied make sure the disk is not full or write protected and that the file is not currently in use" (which it isn't).
Any idea on what I should do?