8000 spam comments that cant be deleted

Hi

I’m running an old install of wordpress and everything is working fine.

However i get a lot of spam comments which i usually go through and delete. Recently Ive left the blog for a month or two and its gathered 8000+ spam comments.

If i try to open the comments in the page [It usually lists all the comments on one page in this version of WP] It just has an empty page saying ‘Done’ in the bottom browser bar. I guess the page is to big to load in the browser window.

My first question is how to delete these comments if they wont load into a page?

Secondly I’d like to turn comments off while I resolve this issue, but WP only has an option to turn off comments for subsequent posts and not an option to turn of comments for existing posts, of which i have hundreds.

Finally i notice that when i make a backup of the MySql database it contains all the spam comments ever made at the site. Why does it not just delete them for good? It means i have a file mostly of rubbish i thought was deleted.

I would very much appreciate any advice on this issues,

http://dataisnature.com

best,
paul