Rollin,

>Thank you for your input David. I have tried to do that as you indicated, and SQL indicates that it was successful, but the log file is still over 74GB!!

I'd say that's a pretty excessive log file *g*

>I went back into the taskpad and looked at the space allocated. the Transaction log is listed at 72GB with only 499 MB being used (i.e. 71.8 GB is free).
>
>I have done full backups of the transaction log, which is also supposed to truncate the log.
>
>I have shrunk the log file multiple times (it gets a little smaller each time - about 3 GB).
>
>Should it be this hard? Is my log file corrupted? Any suggestions?

Is the database in pretty heavy use? Do you run a lot of really huge transactions (ie multi-million row updates/inserts)? If so you might look into smaller batches.

Look up the BACKUP TRAN commands in BOL. The WITH TRUNCATE_ONLY option might help, provided you are confident in your backups. If you do truncate it make sure you take a database backup before and after.

There may be a DBCC or two that you can run to do more extensive log integrity checks.