The latest (and fastest) Delimited String Splitter Function can be found here. It avoids all the RBAR of the while loop. It does require a tally or numbers table, but it's wicked fast when you run it against a table of one million rows that has a column that needs to be split. It works with any delimiter, and columns up to varchar(7999).
Wayne
Microsoft Certified Master: SQL Server 2008
Author - SQL Server T-SQL Recipes