MSSQL Transaction control from asp

Hi all,
I'm supporting an ASP website, and i've come up to this problem.
Every once in a while, the IIS is being restarted by the hosting service and then some of my pages are resetted before the entire transaction is complete. This is very problematic. You can say "why don't you move these deeds to a store procedure?", but this can take time, and i'm looking for a quick temporary solution until i can finish moving this stuff to the stored procedures.
I've tried using
>> sql1 = "begin transaction"
>> sql2 = "insert into tblnews (en) values ('bla bla bla1')"
>> oConn.Execute(sql1)
>> oConn.Execute(sql2)
to check if sql transactions work in asp. they do, but this certain table is locked for about a minute if i don't end the transaction.
Can you tell me why? do you know of a better way?

Thank you very much in advance,
Vova