just do this to retrieve the element count for the loop - we've had to do this a lot..

select @max-2 = @x.value('fn:count(/Employees/Employee)','int')

or you could even include the xpath in the while loop definition:

while @i <= (@x.value('fn:count(/Employees/Employee)','int'))

begin

print @i

set @i = @i + 1

end

there are a lot of fn: xpath functions that work really well for different situations - BOL has a listing of them, just search for "fn:"