I thought about that after I sent my email... Gee, probably won't help you at all, but the button had been pressed and the email sent... Anyway, Once before I have seen a file that root couldn't delete. It was on a badly hosed disk that had suffered a fatal data destroying fsck. I was about to contact the maintainers of ext3 and say to them "Do you want to see a disk image on which root cannot delete a file?", when I thought to check the extended attributes (via "lsattr") -- sure enough, the file system had been corrupted enough that some attribute had been set that inhibited even root from removing the file (perhaps it was flagged as "immutable" -- I don't recall now). The other thought that comes to mind is SELinux, about which I know absolutely nothing. --wpd
