Context:
I have gotten this error twice recently. It appears to be a new type of conda error, because I have been using conda for many years and have never encountered it before. The first time I got it was while using an environment that had worked properly for more than 2 months, and it just came out of nowhere -- I had just activated the env and was not doing an update or anything. So I decided to get rid of the whole conda installation and create a new one, rebuilding the env. I just did that and while installing packages got the error again, but this seems strange because I had not "force-terminated the conda process..." or anything like that, I was just doing normal installs and removes.
It appears that either this error is giving false positives or conda has a new problem.
Steve