Jason,

Thanks for the response. No, there are no recommended indexes shown when I display the execution plan.

As I said, I also have an index on RowNum that includes all the fields I am selecting;with or without the index hint my query is 1. getting the RowNums and 2. using the RowNum index to get all the other fields.

The part of the query that takes the most time is 1. getting the RowNums... however, the whole query takes on the order of 40x as long without the index hint as with it. I'm no expert, but it seems to me that the index is working and is just not being chosen. So I don't understand what you mean when you say the index is in the wrong place...

Thanks.

Tai