Yep. I did the same thing you did here Luis, and it returns in 1 second. Quite an improvement, however the developers are telling me that this is a piece of code written by some 3rd party consultants long ago, and everyone is leery about making any direct modifications to their code.

Apparently, this query crossed over a threshhold of some kind on Monday night and began timing out. When I run the query in an SSMS window, it returns in 33 seconds. I think that the application is timing out at the 30 second mark.

My boss has asked me to research "why" this has just begun failing. I cannot answer that and was hoping to be able to figure out a way to answer his question. It puzzles me that either of the queries can be run by themselves and both return within a second, but when combined using the IN expression, it suddenly takes 33 seconds.