Thanks Gail for your response. does it mean that a previous query can distort the indexed order?

I just discovered something unusual...

When I ran the query I was talking about, I used a (nolock) hint and that was when the results came back in the unsorted order but when I reran the query without the (nolock) hint, the results came back in the correct ascending order of the clustered indexed primary key.

does a (nolock) hint affect sort orders, can it?