Ha! Another fun day in the sun.

Doesn't sound like a CPU issue to me. I have seen CPU deadlocks before, but only as a SS bug which was fixed...

There are a variety of ways to pull this off.

Since it sounds like you are dealing with a master set of data which gets approved via the UAT process,...

SSMS sets the context to the currently selected (highlighted) db. It sounds like you are leaving the word 'databases' selected or some other node, rather than the db of choice....

CXPacket waits are always parallelism related. It is based on logical CPU's. SS addresses the CPUs as seen in Windows. So a dual core will show up as 2...

Yes, I have a system with that exact setup. Course, I installed 2005 first, then 2008. But that shouldn't be an issue.

On another box, we have SQL 2000...