<SOLVED>USB drive acting strange - doesn't show current spac

[extraslow]

Hi all, I did a quick search for this, but didn't see anything. If it's already been covered, let me know.
I'm on Linux Mint 14 cinnamon Nadia 32 bit (phew!)
The USB drives in question are formatted to "msdos" and are USB 2.0 devices.

When I put a USB drive into the usb port, it pops up a little "home" window showing me the contents. I can right click on the name of the drive, select properties and it'll tell me the capacity of the drive and how much space is free or used. So far, so good. let's say it's a 4 Gb drive, and I have 2 Gb of files on it.

The issues comes when I delete files off that drive. if I delete every file off the drive, and then go to properties again, it sill shows exactly the same result as if the files are still there. (still 2 Gb of files) even though it's not showing any files in the window, and it lists the contents as "nothing".

This has happened to me on two different USB drives, and since I'm an old windows user, I tried a restart to see if anything changed, but it didn't. I feel like this has to be something simple, so, help please.

[thegreatgazoo]

If you just click " delete" they get moved to a hidden trash folder. So the files are still they taking up the same amount of space.

Try pressing "shift+delete" to bypass the trashcan and really delete the files.

Or normally delete the files then empty the trash afterwards.

Sent from my Nexus 4 using Tapatalk 2

[extraslow]

Excellent, It's a good thing I posted this in the newbie section.

Clearing the trash worked great.

Thanks for your help.