Finder stalls forever when trying to empty trash

Occasionally, about once a day or every other day, when I try to empty the trash, it'll bring up the progress bar, but it'll say 0 items regardless of how many items are in the trash. It'll stall, the Finder uses up 100+% of CPU, fan goes wild, and it'll stay like that for, as far as I can tell, forever. If that happens, I'll bring up the force quit window, select Finder and click restart. The finder quits, the empty-trash-progress bar disappears, fan slows down, but the Finder does not come back up... The dock seems to be working, but if I click on something to launch it, it won't launch anything. Basically it won't respond to anything. Applications that are already running at this point will continue to run, but behaves strangely, and sometimes won't respond. If I press the power button, it brings up the shutdown/restart option, but selecting one of the options don't seem to do anything, so I end up having to force shutdown by holding down the power button.
After I restart it, there's no problem emptying the trash. It seems to only happen when I've had my computer running for a while, and I can never predict when it'll happen again.
Secure erase trash is disabled.
I've had this issue at least from 10.6.1, and maybe 10.6 as well. Upgrading to 10.6.2 did not resolve it.
Anyone have the same issue, and/or have any clue what might be going on?
EDIT: I'll also add that after this crash happens, and I restart the computer, Spotlight rebuilds the index all over again... so I wonder if Spotlight is crashing when trying to empty trash...?
Message was edited by: doxa

The first and easiest thing I'd try would be the Trash itself.
Go to /Applications /Utilities/Terminal and launch it.
At the prompt, copy and paste this commandsudo rm -rf ~/.TrashPress Return.
You will be asked to enter your admin password. It will be invisible.
Enter it and press Return.
Log out and back in or restart.
Let us know.
-mj

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