Bill,

I'm not sure what you are exactly asking. Are you mentioning that if you just run the Selects you have listed in SSMS you get the same results?

When I run:

Select 'A' + 'A', 'A ' + 'A'

I get:

no_space one_space

-------- ---------

AA A A

I would guess that is because the QP is treating the literals as CHAR not VARCHAR.

Also SSMS connects to the server with ANSI_PADDING ON in the settings by default, you have to explicitly set it to off.