delete query hangs

I ran a simple delete query that should have affected about 2.5 million rows. The query was:

delete from traffic where left(filename, 4) = '0304'

After running this the TLOG increased to about 2 gig, but still had over 5 gig of space left on the disk. Then the SPID for the query showed a status of rollback this stayed like this for over 3 hours. After the status changed to rollback I noticed one of my 4 processors was running near 100% while the others were idle. I was forced to kill the query and reboot the computer. After rebooting the same thing happened again.

Any ideas what is causing this?

I'm running SQL Server 2000Long transactions will cause all sorts of problems - transaction log issues, lock escalation issues ... The short answer is to delete in smaller chunks.