By "up to the second" I just meant that the reports are almost always based on data just saved - i.e. the transaction is complete before the report is run so uncommitted data is irrelevant to these outputs.

I began the arduous task of applying the WITH (READUNCOMMITTED) hint to all the views used by reports in the system (all 2500+ of them) and started seeing immediate performance gains. Overall the servers cache seems to be coping better and the CPU and IO have dropped considerably. The system also has an OLE component that talks to and populates word documents which we took another look at, changed the connection it uses to read uncommitted and explicitly made the recordsets read-only and it's now running five times faster and taking up a half of the server resources it used to. We also reviewed a lot of the indexes and found a few missing based on the current usage. The application as a whole uses transactions sparingly but we also discovered a few that had been misplaced around batches of work and changed their granularity - it's been a hell of a week.

Overall things are back to being operational performant but it's still driving me crazy that I can't tell Crippled Reports to configure it's connections as NOLOCK or READUNCOMMITTED - how hard can it be