error log overflow

[rawal]

situation:
i'm a beginner, on my way to make a php site. i can't seem to solve a problem.

I made a mistake by writing an infinite loop that caused my error.log to overflow. it is now 1.23 gigs. i can't open it using word, notepad, wordpad, or even DOS.
i tried renaming it, and created a new error.log file in the logs directory, but apache still keeps writing to the old file.

question:
how can i clear the old data, so that the file doesn't stay that big? or
how can i create a new error.log file, and delete the old one?

i'm using apache 2.2 with PHP5 on Windows XP.

any help would be much appreciated.