It can happen that you have HIGH logical reads for empty table (or small table), and query processing time is way too long. The reason is your table has so many empty pages. You simply drop and re-create your table.

Optimizer does not use index when table is empty or has only few rows. Instead, it does logical reads for thousands and thousands of empty pages. I believe Microsoft is still not aware of this problem.

DBCC checktable(<tablename>) will tell you how many pages.

Hope this helps,

Thinh Ho