Open Radar

 
Summary:
If an application that supports automatic termination has its last window closed, Lion may actually still leave the application running in the background. If you then go to move such an application to the trash in the Finder, the Finder reports an error message saying that the application cannot be trashed because it is still open. However, because the app does not appear in either the Dock or the application switcher, it appears to the user that the app is in fact _not_ still open. This makes such an error message very confusing.

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Open an application that supports automatic termination, such as TextEdit.
2. After the blank TextEdit document appears, click the close button to close the empty window.
3. Switch back to the Finder, and TextEdit should then disappear from the Dock, and no longer appear in the command-tab switcher.
4. Note that if you open Activity Monitor at this point, it will reveal that TextEdit is still running
5. Go to the Applications folder in the Finder, select TextEdit, and drag it to the trash.

Expected Results:
TextEdit should be moved to the trash*.

Actual Results:
The Finder displays an error message saying "The item “TextEdit” can’t be moved to the Trash because it’s open."

Notes:
*Lion provides additional protection so that apps included with the system cannot be easily trashed. So in the particular case of TextEdit, you would actually receive a different message saying you cannot trash TextEdit. However, the bug here applies to any application that supports automatic termination in Lion, TextEdit is just a convenient example here.

I would suggest that the solution for this case would be for the Finder to automatically quit the application in the background, then move it to the trash, so that the process appears transparent to the user.