thanks guys,

you got me to think that maybe the index of my main table is not as good as it could be. I got a number of fields (I think...

One additional bit of info:

the data consisted of 3 year periods:

The first lot was from a table created in Access and exported to SQL Server,

The second lot was imported from...

thanks for your responses Andy and Antares686.

Andy, I have to go and learn how to do a specific trace (flag 1204???) and how to see the errors log. Oh boy,...