Funny Zero-Kb files on Desktop that won't go anywhere!

It's like this: my brother came with a CD full of holiday photos which he wanted to show us. Only some of them he preferred not to show us (...)
To accomodate him, I set up a new standard account on my Powerbook, fired up iPhoto 6, put the CD in the Superdrive, and showed him how to import all the photos (without making copies on the hard disk, that is), then to filter out the ones he wanted to omit and allow everything else to be included in the Slideshow.
Just to embarrass me and show me how things can go wrong on the Mac, he thought that deleting photos from iPhoto meant selecting them and dragging them out of the main iPhoto window and into the trash in the Dock By mistake he selected all 280 photos and dragged them onto the Desktop (obviously missing the Trash icon in the Dock) at which point the Mac seemed to freeze. The desktop filled with the 280 photo files (or references to them, I'm not sure, each of them being 'Zero Kb' in Get Info), piled icon upon icon on the same space on the screen, so much so that the cute shadow around the Preview icon for each of the 280 files becoming so black, it looked ridiculous.
Anyway, when it came to tidying up the mess, the files on the Desktop refused to be Trashed or moved into another location within the same account. I got messages like
"The item "DSC04166.JPG" contains one or more busy items that cannot be changed. [OK]"
when trying either trashing or moving them.
When I tried to double click on any of the 280 photo files, I got the message
"Item "DSC04166.JPG" is used by Mac OS X and cannot be opened. [OK]"
In the end I just logged into my own account's Terminal, issued a sudo -s, then used rm to trash the things. Weird.
Anyone knows what went wrong? Many thanks, as always.
PowerBook G4 17 1.67GHz Mac OS X (10.4.5) TiBook Gigabit Ethernet, B/W G3, Win2K, WinXP

Forgot to mention that I typed "ls -aolR DSC......" and the User/System Immutable Flags had not been set.
In case you were wondering...

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==================
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