I'm having trouble with a site collection in a MOSS2007 farm. I'm trying to enable the Publishing feature at the site collection level. When I try to activate the Feature from Site Settings -> site Collection features, I get one of those incredibly helpful SharePoint error messages.
Error. Cannot complete this action. Please try again.
So I thought I'd try with stsadm, and I ran this
stsadm -o activatefeature -name Publishing -url http://server/site
I got the more helpful error message
Provisioning did not succeed. Details: Failed to create the 'Pages' library. OriginalException: The feature failed to activate because a list at 'Pages' already exists in this site. Delete or rename the list and try activating the feature again.
Now that's more like it! I checked, and sure enough there was a Pages library. I deleted it. I ran stsadm again fully expecting it to work this time. No dice. I'm getting the same error, but now there's no 'Pages' document library. I emptied the recycle bin. Same error. I'm stumped.
Per the two suggestions below, I made sure that the site collection recylcle bin was also emptied and that there were no 'Images' or 'Documents' libraries hanging around. I still can't activate the feature.