Since the trick with TOP 100 PERCENT, which in most cases worked on Sql Server 2000 when You wanted to have sorted views or inline functions, does not work anymore on Sql Server 2005 due to "smarter" query optimizer, You have to look for another solution.
Here is one of them:
instead on TOP 100 PERCENT clause You can use TOP 9223372036854775807, where the big number is maximum value for bigint data type. If You use greater number then You will receive an error message 'Arithmetic overflow error converting expression to data type bigint' but in all likelihood You do not have such number of records in the table.
Another dirty trick is to use TOP 99.999999999999999999999999999999999999 PERCENT (38 nines - maximum allowed precision for decimal data type) clause which also worked good enough for my needs.
