I am running into problems when emptying a "large" table (some 80000
records of 4 KB each - not so large, but significantly larger than any
other table in my database).

1) DELETE FROM Table takes a long time (3 minutes on this test run)
2) Further backups can take forever when they encounter this table, even
though it doesn't contain any more data.

This problem was multiplied once when, for some reason, my table-filling
tool entered an infinite loop and inserted 2.5 million records before I
stopped it. DELETE was reasonably fast back then (several minutes), but
I couldn't do a backup at all - I started it friday evening and on
monday morning, when I needed to use the database again, wasn't finished
- I was still hung up on that deleted table.

The questions is: Can I empty the table in any way which would not lead
to these two problems?

I am using Firebird 1.5.5 locally on Windows XP in superserver mode.

Thanks, Pepak