ARRRGGGHHHH

You are the man. It was the use of char that was screwing it up.

thanks!

Close but it only returns the first character in the string: A

That worked like a charm! I am using SQL 2000 so I used the NEWID() function but basically the same concept and I eliminated my locking problems.

thanks!

ROCK ON!

Now that is what I'm talking about. I'll give that a whirl!

Thanks for the input! I have my temp tables built at the very beginning of all sp code and not later on in the code for that reason. ...

I've been meaning to come back and post my solution but never got around to it.

I couldn't get the previous suggestions to work.

So.

I inserted the data into a temp table...