Deleting large QTable too slow

Hi
I have a large QTable with ~1million element, with data in each element (it is not a sparse table). QTable renders in a reasonable time, a few seconds, and the performance is pretty good. However, when I try to clean up the table using QTable->deleteLater() it takes an enormous amount of time, in fact I haven't seen the end of it.

I am using Qt3, are there any tricks to speeding up the delete? It is unusable at this point. I find it hard to believe that the rendering and performance are good but the clean up is not.
It spends most of the time in contents.clear() in the QTable destructor.

Thank you for any help or tips you can offer!!!

Maryann