Thanks - Gail and Lowell. Yes, I know sysindexes is being deprecated, but as Lowell pointed out, it is very handy and having worked with SQL Server since 6.5, I am much more handier with all the old system objects than what 2005 brought to the party. I am hoping that SQL 2008 doesn't have these issues and has a better algorithm for managing stats.

SQL 2005 in my view is the buggiest SQL Server release to date. There are other problems that I have talked to MS about (and they claim it's a feature !) and these problems (aka "features") have mysteriously dissappeared in SQL 2008.

The trouble though, is that the consistency is still not where we want it to be. It will be fine 9 times out of 10, when we update stats ourselves with a frequency of 5 minutes and the 10th round of processing will again slow down, because the processing started, say 2 seconds before the next scheduled run of my update stats script kicked off, and processing of financials in the intervening 4 1/2 minutes or so have rendered the stats out of date. The bigger picture here is that we are not able to scale with the hardware. We have clients bringing online HP G3's and G4's with 4 quad cores and 64 gigs of memory, with the expectation that they can push thru higher volume of processing and once they present the higher volume to SQL, stats are not kept up to date and slowdowns occur.

Very uncomfortable sessions result with Client DBA's and having to explain that their most recent purchase of a $20,000 server doesn't really help their users. It is a very sticky situation and an awkward conversation to have not to mention seeing the same in our production environments.