online engine use of disk space

I have been working with the informix online engine 4.0 for about 2 years now and we have gradually filled the disk space allocated to the database. (We are running at about 99% now.) We do plan to get a new drive to solve the problem, but in the meantime we are experiencing some hardships. We have had programs fail because there was not enough scratch space and we have had to drop tables that we would like to have kept on hand. Recently, I deleted about half of the 500,000 customers that we had in our active set along with their orders. I expected to have a proportional amount of disk space freed. I was surprised to find that we got nothing at all returned disk space. After some experimentation, we found that even after a table was completely emptied and all indexes were dropped, it continued to claim the space it occupied when full. We did find that we could re- size a table by unloading the data, dropping the table, re-creating it, and re-loading the data. We have done this to make more space. This seems to be a lot more work than is necessary. There has to be an easier way to re-claim the space from deleted rows. Is there some utility that does this? Do more recent versions address this problem. I would appreciate any advice at all on how to deal with this problem. Thanks. - REED MATHEWS FYHG22F@prodigy.com