This issue might be related to parallelism.  You also didn't mention how fast those 4 CPUs are...

Look at the execution plan and see how much of the cost is due...

Yes, and I have seen several cases where the lack of a clustered index lead the optimizer to choose poor execution plans using the wrong index etc...

Put a clustered index...

It is possible to do this, but I prefer to handle most transactions at the data layer.  Handling this at the application layer leads to lots of round trips.

That should work, there is nothing about a cluster that changes the nature of tempdb.

The only possibility I can think of is that you should verify that the volume to which...

208 sets quoted identifier on

See this article for more information:

http://www.sql-server-performance.com/rd_traceflags.asp

There also might be some benefit to backup/restore operations if the database is large.

Windows?

I have seen very few situations where Savepoints are truly useful, but Books Online has a pretty good discussion on when they might be useful.

The answer to your second question...

What OS is the workstation running?  And is it true 64 bit hardware or is it 32 bit with 64 bit extensions?

I'm getting into my "Way back machine" here, but I think support for cursors was introduced in 6.5.

Access ins't a database, to be charitable, it's a database management system.  That isn't just a quibble,  but leaving that aside, Access doesn't really even qualify as a SQL DBMS,...

- Restricting unauthorized access to data.

- Providing multiple interfaces to different classes of users.

- Representing complex relationships among data.

- Enforcing integrity constraints on the database.

-...

All of your DDL scripts should include the owner name just to avoid this kind of ambiguity.  The only role that automatically aliases to dbo is the system admins or...

By saying "data persists" I meant that data tends to live much longer than applications.  Furthermore data is more important than applications.  That chart, and countless others drawn from an application...

You seem to be advocating using the database merely as a "persistence mechanism" for the application.  In reality it is applications that come and go, while data tends to persist...