That is very curious I have seen lots of stripes being created because of memory problems. But normally he only gets down to 5000 rows and then out of memory.
Which version of Hive are you using? What are your memory settings for the hive tasks and if the file is small is it possible that the table is partitioned and the task is writing into a large number of partitions at the same time?
Can you share the LOAD command and the table layout?