>If you find yourself lashing together multiple steps to do something that should be easy, it's time to get another pair of eyeballs on the problem. Or have a beer and figure out some other way to cut the Gordian knot (which as I understand it originated somewhere in your neck of the woods).

One step I shouldn't have skipped - upgrade my TotalCommander, which I forgot to do last three years. Now it says in http://ghisler.com/mailing.htm,

New in Total Commander 8.50:

File operations:
F5 copy: First copy all files where the user doesn't need to be asked and skip all with errors, ask at the end
F8 Delete: Only warn at the end if folders couldn't be deleted

(there were more in between, but these two would have saved me some time).