Why doesn't "secure erase" ever complete?

RE: OS X 10.6.7
I've set up Filevault on my Macbook Pro.  Didn't take too long.
I selected secure erase of the original home folder in the background.  It's been going on for days. Sys prefs reports that it is "10% complete."  Percent never changes. 
The drive is 500GB.  242GB used; 221GB available. Also a 32GB Bootcamp partition.
The encrypted home folder info reports 931GB capacity; 221GB available; & 710GB used.  Not immediately clear what this means.
When the system starts up, activity monitor reports high rates (~100MB/sec) of writes; after a few minutes this drops down to 4.0-to-8.0MB/sec.
By now hundreds and hundreds of GB have been written.
Will it ever finish?

Topher,
Thanks, your point is clear.  Perhaps mine isn't.
The secure erase operation was not initiated by me to delete arbitrary files, after Filevault was setup and the original un-encrypted home folder was erased.  I'm not there yet!
Rather, this is the secure erase that I selected, which was offered following the creation of the Filevault, to delete the original, un-encrypted home folder.
Some progress is now being reported:  The "10% complete" message, now says "88% complete."
Available space has increased from 221GB to 275GB.  Perhaps if will finsih in the next day or two, on its own.
Since my original post, I had some success in finding older posts and discussions about FV issues & older OS X versions.  They're troublesome--FV not working with Time Machine, etc. I use TM at home with the 3 Macs here, and I was interested in setting up FV on all of them. The iBook G3 runs 10.4 of course.  Not clear anymore that this plan is any good.
Also I have a a volunteer task for a non-profit, with a PowerMac G4 Gigabyte 10.4 system, that should have something like FV installed--at least some member data encrypted--and needs a backup system as well.
If FV & TM from Apple are not good solutions, what are?

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