That provides the answer, namely that the only way to get rid of the offending file is to restart. Ergo no less drastic way to deal with the issue. {sigh} Time to move on.
There in a nutshell is one of the reasons why, other than in the Parallels Desktop environment, I no longer have any Microsoft code on my Macs. The only reason I have Parallels Desktop is to test web sites in Explorer.
I have not found a perfect replacement for Word but
Mellel,
NeoOffice, and
Nisus Writer Pro, and
Pages all do a decent job of importing and exporting .doc and .docx files.
