• I tried that and it still took a long time.

    I didn't run profiler at the time to see if it still chose to do the cursor fetch but I will be looking into that.

    I just restored the same 3 db's onto another linked server that was 2005 so it's not a 2000/2005 issue from what I can tell.

    It may just be that this stored proc (and application as a whole) won't perform very well across linked servers due to the programming style.