Sergiy, you make some good points. However, in my original post I wasn't particularly concerned with the excess of zeroes because like you said, it's better that the UI handle that formatting function and in this application it does.

As for the time being bound to the date...well, no, not in this case. As I pointed out in the OP the data I'm getting from the application is actually in the form "10:35","14:22", etc. The column of times is part of a set of data for just one particular day so that date is displayed elsewhere and is not connected to the tee time column (though it could be concatenated into a datetime if it was necessary which in this case it wasn't).

The only reason I even needed to use a date/time-related datatype conversion at all was for sorting purposes and for calculating a duration--and that there are major differences between SQL2005 and SQL2008 when trying to do that. Pointing out these differences was really all I was trying to demonstrate.

But believe me that I'm not trying to be defensive or snippy. Feedback is always appreciated. Iron sharpens iron. 😉