Trash can too full to empty

somehow in cleaning house i managed to put way more into my trash can than I intended. I normally empty as I go, but I guess I got caught up in what was I doing. Now when I go to empty the trash I make sure nothing else is going on and I go to empty and it says preparing like 180,000 items for trash and it never gets farther than that. (I must of got a file with a lot of little things). I've let it be for 2 hours and nothing, I've tried restarting my computer and nothing, I've tried moving things out of the trash but it winds up copying them instead of physically moving them. I'm stumped, before I run out of space I thought I'd ask for help.
Thanks,
Logan

So I managed after rebooting my computer to be able to right click the items in the trash and press "put back" and got all but one file back. I tried to delete the one file but it won't do it. The file is from an external hard drive that I was using with Time Machine on an older computer. I didn't need the files anymore so I thought I could just trash them. Now I can't delete it or put it back. The exact file name is 2009-08-10-191144.inProgress Once I unplugged the external drive and restarted the computer the file wasn't there, but once I plugged the drive back in the file was mysteriously there again and still will not delete.

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