Hi Grant,

I have done a cursory check of the settings on both servers and nothing different stands out. I did run a test with 'Optimise for Ad Hoc Workloads', but this doesnt seem to have sped things up at all.

As far as looking at read committed snapshot, the testing I have been performing is on an idle server so there is definately no locking going on - if anything I think this would degrade performance rather than improve it for this particular application.

As mentioned previously, updating statistics did nothing.

Thanks for your suggestions though.

I am starting to think that the newer server is simply just slower at opening and closing connections when compared to SQL 2005? Is there any merit in this?