sharepoint 2010 - The file is locked for exclusive use by.....

This is an annoying "feature" that I ran into the first time yesterday.  I found lots of possible solutions none of which was working.  We have several Microsoft Word templates in a document library.  It is linked with Word to allow you to pick a template when creating a new document.  I needed to change one of the templates, but kept getting the message "The file is locked for exclusive use by".  I contacted the developer and had them exit out of Word.  I waited 30 minutes and was still getting the same error.  After working through many different solutions, I had the developer open the document one more time, and then immediately close out.  The lock went away and I could edit the template.