I also had a strange encounter with this problem. After empting the logfile with the backup with no-log option, i was able to shrink the file in sql2000 with the DBCC shrinkfile command, but this didn't work on a WinNT SQL7 machine. Here i solved the problem by using enterprise manager / all tasks/ Truncate Log ( an option not availble in the 2000 version). To my surprise, the log was shrunk, not truncated! Perhaps they misnamed the option?