Thanks again for your reply - I think you've answered my question.

 

The reason the live site is accessing the SQL Server at another location is because the site was originally...

I'm not 100% sure of the exact specs of the servers although they are all operating in a commercial hosting environment running Win2003. The SQL Server is on a dedicated server and is...

Yes, there are indexes in most of the tables (id columns) - these were upsized from the Access database which were originally Autonumber columns.