Our developers use nHibernate here and we also use a collation of SQL_Latin1_General_CP1_CI_AS, so I was curious if I would be able to reproduce this same issue. We actually have a very similiar scenario, a table that holds person information with a non-clustered index on the LastName field, which is a dataype of nvarchar(100). Everytime I tried to reproduce your issue, it always did a clustered index seek, not a scan. This is good, however I was kind of hoping I would be able to reproduce it to convince our developers to move away from nvarchar :). I've tried clearing the query cache, dropping/recreating indexes, etc, and it always seems to perform a scan. We are using SQL Server 2005 - any ideas?

Adam