Thanks David and Sean for your suggestions.Sean your right, workaround #1 is out of the question.

Workaround #2 which is -->Create a view on the local server and then select from that view, instead of selecting from the view on the remote linked server.

It did not work,so i did the oppposite,i created a view on the remote linked server which selects from sysindexes , so i do not query sysindexes directly.

create view tot_att_vw

as

select rows from sysindexes

where indid < 2

and id = object_id("attendance_details")

so in the stored procedure i will be running :

select rows

FROM [serverRunningsql2000].[dbname].dbo.tot_att_vw

Though i am thinking of calling an sp instead of a view.

Thanks again for your suggestions.