I had a question from a client this morning who was having problems deleting a couple of files in the “documents” folder using Team Foundation Explorer. They right-clicked the file to delete and selected delete from the context menu. The file dutifully disappeared and they thought everything was fine. The problem occurred when they refreshed the view in Team Explorer and the files suddenly reappeared. They did not see any error message when they did the delete, the files disappeared as expected but they would keep coming back. I walked them through a couple of security settings and everything was OK in that area. I then had them go into the Project Portal and view the document library through the portal. It was at this stage that the actual issue came to light…  The files were checked out by another team members (for the past 5 weeks). As soon as the person checked the files in, the deletion process was far more successful.

The problem in summary is that when you try to delete files from the WSS Documents folder using Team Explorer and someone has the files checked out, the delete appears to work and no error is shown if someone has the files checked out. The files will suddenly reappear next time the view is refreshed.