Could be that there's some other statements being passed from the app and something else is waiting for a lock, because with the nolock hint applied to a table, SQL doesn't take shared locks on that table. If it needs exclusive locks it'll still take those, it'll still take the schema locks, but no shared locks.

Investigate and see exactly what lock is being waited for (sysprocesses has been deprecated for over 10 years, so rather use the DMVs, they give a lot more info). Guessing as to what's happening is a good way to waste a lot of time.