Thanks Chandan and Chris,

Have already tried the OPENQUERY and the recent EXECUTE AT remoteserver feature (latter having the much needed ability to pass parameters) and both work wonderfully well for this query.

The thing that amazes me is that this performance problem is not consistent. At times, it goes through and intermittently it does not.

I am unable to explain to my users why a thing that was working in the past (4 part query with the variable) does not work now, and why the code change is required.