Excellent information, thanks!

I took an easy way out, and it actually worked... I copied all of stored procedure into a new one, name tmpusp, ran it, and it ran...

Not locking (as stated above), as far as I know, but I'll try the nolock, just in case.

And I'm using the latter rather than the former for hardset parameters. ...

Not that I can tell, and I would assume that if there were locking/blocking issues, they would occur when run as TSQL statements as well.

The line in question...