rm: file exists. filesystem problem?

[Herb Peyerl]

I've been having a fair number of problems with my release of BNews
on my PC-RT 6150-25 running AIX 2.2.1... This morning I did an 
expire -e 0 and it basically didn't find any of the 32000 blocks of
news that was sitting there... So, fine, this has happened before.. I
ran my little script that deletes the current news structure and recreates
it with the proper permissions and owners... Except that in the 
'rm -r' portion of our program, I got 4 "rm: file exists" messages. I
dug into the filesystem a bit and found :

# du -a
4	./comp/sys
8	./comp
4	./sci/med
8	./sci
24	.

# rm -r comp/sys
rmdir: file exists
# cd comp/sys
# ls -al
total 8
drwxrwxrwx   3 news      news          592 Jan  7 12:52 .
drwxrwxr--   3 news      news          800 Jan  7 12:54 ..
# cd ..
# rm -ri *
directory sys: y
sys: y
rmdir: file exists
# rm sys
rm: sys directory
#


Anyone have any ideas?  I often run out of disk space on that particular
filesystem and it occasionally gets screwed up after BNews has had it's
way with it... I end up recreating the filesystem once every couple of
months... Should this be the way a unix machine should work?  

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