"relation deleted while in use" encountered with Postgresql 8.0.8

Hi,

I'm using a python script w/ the PyGreSQL library to insert 1 billion rows
into a database table for an experiment (performing a commit every 10K
rows). My script failed at about 170M rows with the following exception:

File "/usr/lib64/python2.3/site-packages/pgdb.py", line 163, in execute
self.executemany(operation, (params,))
File "/usr/lib64/python2.3/site-packages/pgdb.py", line 185, in
executemany
raise DatabaseError, "error '%s' in '%s'" % ( msg, sql )
pg.DatabaseError: error 'ERROR: relation 184577 deleted while still in use
' in 'INSERT INTO nfs_files_10 (mxid, fhInode, fhGen, fhSnapId, fhFlags,
name, parentInode, parentGen, parentSnapId, parentFlags, extension, type,
atime, mtime, fileSize, owner, generation) VALUES (10, 120, 927370846, 0, 0,
'gummy0.txt', 1204041, 927370729, 0, 0, 'txt', 0, 1112147234, 1112147234,
40960, NULL, 2);'

After this error, my database table no longer exists and appeared to have
been dropped, although my script was doing only INSERT statements. Any ideas
on what might be causing this and/or if this a known issue and possible
solutions would be greatly appreciated.

thanks,
Gautam