A strange problem that I ran into recently on a couple of our machines was what appeared to be a brokent recycle bin. Basically, you delete files to the recycle bin, but if you open it there are no files listed. When you try empty the recycle bin, it tells you that X number of files will be deleted so it knows files are there.

The fix I found was to create another recycle bin. Unfortunately, when you do this, the existing files cannot be recovered, but at least it gets you a functional ‘new’ recycle bin. I am still not exactly sure what caused this, but if it happens to you, at least you won’t have to do a repair or reinstall of Windows to fix it.