thanks everyone for your help.  i was able to work through it.

apart from the major brain freeze of getting my IDENTITY_INSERT OFF and ONs mixed up (and who hasn't done that before ) it was as i had feared - i needed to specify the column names - SELECT * just couldn't handle it.

so i wrote a small function that built a comma separated list of all the column names for the table name and used that in the SELECT statement (i included it below).  and i alos modified the code to use the correct ON and OFF.

i also never realised that you could only have one ON per session so the OFF after the INSERT was added.

thanks to everyone. 

working code:

ALTER FUNCTION dbo.arc_udfGetTableColumns

(

         @tablename VARCHAR(200)

)

RETURNS VARCHAR(5000)

AS

BEGIN

  DECLARE @rc VARCHAR(5000)

  DECLARE @colName VARCHAR(200)

  DECLARE @comma VARCHAR(2)

  SELECT @rc = ''

  SELECT @comma = ''

  DECLARE curColumns CURSOR LOCAL FORWARD_ONLY STATIC FOR

    SELECT [name] FROM syscolumns

    WHERE id = (SELECT id FROM sysobjects WHERE type = 'U' AND [NAME] = @tablename)

    ORDER BY colorder

 

  OPEN curColumns

  FETCH NEXT FROM curColumns INTO @colName

  WHILE (@@FETCH_STATUS >= 0)

  BEGIN

    IF @@FETCH_STATUS < 0

      BREAK

 

   SELECT @rc = @rc + @comma + @colName

   SELECT @comma = ', '

 

    FETCH NEXT FROM curColumns INTO @colName

  END

 

  CLOSE curColumns

  DEALLOCATE curColumns

 

  RETURN @rc

END

so the original INSERT code above becomes :

SELECT @cols = dbo.arc_udfGetTableColumns(@tablename)