Serious gotcha for SharePoint 2007 large site deletion

While trying to delete a large SharePoint site as part of an internal migration of data.  Ran into severe problems.

SharePoint 2007 seemed unable to handle deletion of sites where there is greater than 25 Gig of data with lists that had thousands of items say 30,000 +

Perhaps this is the real reason why they warn people of having lists greater than 10,000 items.  Even though the site's performance its OK, you have problems removing them.

You will find even an stsadm statement like the following won't work. Yes, even if you code in the WebID

stsadm -o deleteweb  -force -webid ea949749-8f81-40b0-8c76-0cfc37c62d7d -databasename WSS_Content_XYZ -databaseserver XYZ_UAT\SQLSERVER2008 

Then even if you delete the libraries first.  You will find it cannot be emptied easily from the second layer recycle bin.  Everytime you try to empty a large list the whole site collection gets locked out and effectively knocking the whole site out of action.  This is a bad flaw with the product from an admin perspective.  MS recommends getting a powerful server to do the business but that's simply not possible in some business scenarios. Especially if one goes by the rule that you want to test first on a Test Server before running it on a live server.  Most Test Servers are not spec particularly hot.  

Therefore, you can never test properly whether a deletion would work.

What we found eventually worked was if we went into the recycle bin and emptied each of the libraries individually one at the time.  Each time locking out 

the site for a long period of time.  Eventually all the big libraries got cleared and the site was able to be deleted.

Basically with this feature, you must schedule in long downtimes for large site deletion.  Not good for any Live site.

Well and surely Konged by it.