I'm trying to uninstall Ubuntu 12.04 and purge my solid state drive of all partitions. I booted from Ubuntu 12.04 live DVD, then chose Try Ubuntu option. Then I opened Gparted via command prompt. In GParted I highlighted my logical SSD partition (220 GB) containing Ubuntu, clicked "Partition" menu up top and chose Delete. One hour later I still have message at bottom showing "1 operation pending". But in GParted's partition list it now shows I have 221GB of unallocated space, so does this mean I can ignore the eternal "Operation Pending" message at bottom of Gparted dialog? I tried to delete the swap partition in same manner, but in this case the "Delete" option is ghosted. Is it now safe to load Windows 7 and repartition everything with NTFS, even though I was not allowed to delete the swap partition? My solid state drive has 240GB, so there's 20GB still unaccounted for, and I'm worried this may come back to haunt me as I repartition all with NTFS.

You need to click "Apply All Operations" (green checkmark icon) to proceed.

To delete the swap partition, you must first turn off swap (can't delete a partition while it's in use):

the fastest way to clean a device, boot with a live cd for example, as root do
dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda count=3000

Just go ahead and install windows. I've not installed windows in a long time, but I'm sure there has to be an option where you can choose the whole drive for installation in it. Choose it and go ahead and the windows installer will take care of doing everything for you. Unless of course this isn't what you want to do.

Thank you for the helpful answer! I hate to admit that one day after I submitted this I found the
Edit menu - Apply All Operations option. Oops.