Sorry I cannot really answer that.... as the server had been neglected, the backups appear to have failed for some time now.

Not sure it helps, but I noted as soon as I had cancelled the shrink that had been running a couple of days, the log file backup was much bigger.

I have been executing must of my commands to this server from a remote machine with SSMS 2008 installed. Today I decided to re-visit sql 2000 query analyser and fired that up on the server in question. I ran the shrink from there but instead of shrinking to 0% free I set it to 50% first.

The shrink ran suprisingly quick and freed up around 10gig. I ran another and this time set it to 40% and this ran quick also. I have now kicked off another delete to run over the weekend.

I feel confident that I will manage to get the space down significantly in this way.