Thanks matt,

I take it that the SQL server is a 64bit box and doesnt have any throttling going on in terms of Max Degree of Parallelism, max memory usage.

How many processors does the box have?

Also that the Temp Db, source DB and logs are located on different physical disks rather than being on the same disk.

I personally cant see anything wrong with the query and if it works ok on other boxes, then it really can only be hardware configuration that is a problem.

Out of curiosity have you tried running the query with the Option(MAXDOP 1) to see if that helps, as i noticed a lot of parallelism going on in the plans and sometimes it can impact the query signficantly.