I am frequently frustrated by the
excessive caution imposed by
windows operating systems and associated software on regular users. While it is certainly an honourable intention to prevent people from
accidental file deletion, it's really verging on the ridiculous now.
Historically, when you deleted a file from a FAT filesytem in DOS or Windows 3.1 all that would happen was the Operating system would overwrite the first character of the filename on the FAT, so that it wouldn't show up. The file was not actually erased, just no longer accessible. It was quite often possible to recover these files with a utility such as undelete which shipped with DOS 6.1 as I recall.
Windows 95 came to pass, and now your 'deleted' files go to the recycle bin. Once you empty the recycle bin, it's gone for good. This is all the protection you should need. BUT NO!!!.
Consider this sequence required to delete a file using the file manager:
It's now not only Windows that does this. Lotus Notes does it as well. To delete a "note" you must click delete, them select Actions->Empty Trash. With my company's webmail selecting a message and clicking delete is not enough, you must then expunge to get rid of it!
Contrast with the simplicity of deleting a file in unix:
% rm HOT-PR0N.MPG
%
poof! gone!
If only I could prevent windows from second-guessing me all the time...