PostgreSQL disk space reclaiming

Greetings,

I am having problems reclaiming an excessive amount of disk space used 
by a database, running on Windows PostgreSQL v8.3 (unfortunately we are 
stuck with this version at the moment).

The database had a 16GB table, that I deleted a lot of data from.  After 
deleting from this table, I ran a VACUUM FULL on it and it didn't give 
the freed space to the operating system - whats more, running "select 
pg_database_size('db')" says that the database is still taking up 25GB.

After this I did some reading, and decided to recreate the table - so I 
recreated it with a different name, ran a SELECT * to insert into it, 
and recreated the indexes on it.  This new table takes up 3GB only.  
After this I dropped the old table, and renamed the new table to the 
same name as the old table.  I read on various sites that as soon as you 
commit a "DROP TABLE" command, it returns the used disk space to the 
operating system.  This did not work either - postgres still reports 
25GB being used by the database.  If I select the size of all the tables 
in the database postgres reports around 9GB or so, yet reports that the 
database itself is 25GB.

After that, I ran a VACUUM FULL across the entire database, and it 
returned about 1GB to the operating system, which I think was from 
another large table that got cleaned out (but not recreated).

I am now at a loss, as I want the 16GB from that old table back in the 
operating system for other means (disk space is severely limited on this 
particular machine) and have tried all suggestions I could find from 
googling to no avail.  Due to new rules implemented in our data 
processing, our database will not grow anywhere near as big as it did 
previously - so postgres holding on to all this extra space is a 
complete waste also.

Note that it is not really feasible for me to uninstall postgres, 
upgrade it and rebuild all my databases at this stage as our system has 
a high availability requirement.

Is there anything else I can do to get postgres to give me back all that 
unused space?

Thanks for any help people can give!

Anthony Bull

Software Architect
m2Wealth International Ltd.