Your first suggestion for a full tran log is to shrink it. Maybe I'm missing something, but that's completely the opposite of what's needed.

The log is full, ie, there is no free space within the log file. Since there is no free space within the log file, a shrink will find no space to release to the OS. Even if the shrink did find some free space, that'll just make the situation worse.

If the log file is full you need to either reduce the amount of data inside it by either backing the log up or switching to simple recovery, or you need to grow the log file to give it more space.