PostgreSQL slow after VACUUM

Hi all.

I have the following:

- Mandrake Linux 9.1
- PostgreSQL 7.3.2 MDK5

There is one DB and one DB user. The DB is cleared and loaded with the
data of same volume each month (monthly report). The volume is not small
and it usually takes 3 hours to load. Loading is done with SQL files
which use transactions, 10,000 SQL statements per transaction.

A couple of days ago, disk became full, since we were not doing VACUUM
on the DB at all. So, I deleted all records from the 3 tables the DB has
and performed "VACUUM FULL ANALYZE". This reclaimed the space.

My problem is that the load is now taking (to my estimate) 20 times more!

Anything I could do to find out what's going on? There is nothing in the
logs that I can see.

Nix.