One followup. (Hope I'm not annoying everybody):

With the Simple recovery model I'm using, would BEGIN TRANS and COMMIT statements help free up space in the log when used as follows:

instead of using this:

delete from x ...

update x ...

insert into x ...

use something like this below (that way the log space might be reused) ?

BEGIN TRAN

delete from x ...

COMMIT

BEGIN TRAN

update x ...

COMMIT

BEGIN TRAN

insert into x ...

COMMIT