How to quickly empty a very full recycle bin?

I have deleted about half a million files from a folder, and didn't think to press Shift in order to delete them completely straight away.

Now they're clogging my recycle bin, and Windows claims it will take 4 hours to empty it - it claims to do about 68 files per second.

Is there some magic or an alternative method that can speed this up?

Bounty - I'm starting a bounty. The files are still in my bin, as there was no pressing need to get rid of them and this way, I can try out the suggestions presented. I am, however, looking for a way that does not include hard-deleting the contents of the RECYCLER folder - I'm sure that would work, but it feels a bit unclean to me.

There's RecycleNOW, a small utility that empties the Recycle Bin immediately, no matter how much it contains. (Or at least I've seen it run very quickly even with my Recycle Bin containing ~1 GB of data.) Works with Windows 7.

Once you get it, just double-click on the executable file, and it's done. The Recycle Bin should be empty.

Do you have a virus scanner that does on-access scanning? Disable it during your delete action.

With my virus scanner disabled deleting is over 10 times faster.

(I never understood why it checks files that are about to be deleted)