.afpDeleted* files, who's making them?

Solution 1:

In the 2004 words of Leland Wallace, an Apple employee in the Core Servers group:

There is a unix programming "pattern" of creating a temp file, opening it, then deleting it, keeping it open. This allows the application to have a private scratch file that cannot be accessed by any other process (the file will to be completely deleted when it is closed). AFP does not have direct support for "open-delete" so we need to fake it by renaming the "deleted" file to .afpDeletedXXX and deferring the delete until it is closed.

Source: http://lists.apple.com/archives/macos-x-server/2004/Jun/msg01271.html