The bit that concerns me is the BOL entry that warns that this takes 1/8th of the server memory. So a 16GB box is going to lose 2GB RAM just for opening a World document.

In SQL2000 I'm pretty sure that the XML parser is MSXML3 where as the most up-to-date version is MSXML6.0.

It's a shame because its an elegant solution let down by the underlying technology.