Interesting theory. I do have a virus scanner, and also Google Desktop Search. Sometimes I get this error when running a large suite of unit tests. Each unit test starts off by cleaning the test output directory, and failing if it can't do so. I will see many (hundreds?) tests fail because the file can't be removed, and then eventually the file will get removed. My feeling is that if a virus scanner or desktop search were keeping the file open, that it would only do so briefly. On the other hand, when I'm running unit tests I'm chewing up a lot of CPU so perhaps it takes longer in those cases.
If we assume that this theory is correct, then what is the solution? Sleep for a little while and try again? -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list