check your sqlagent properties/ jobsystem and raise the jobhistory lines.

afaik there is no way of stating that each job should retain at least the last month or n-days of execution...

What's DBCC CHECKDB stating ?

Also check out : http://www.sqlservercentral.com/forums/shwmessage.aspx?forumid=5&messageid=197066 

and http://www.portsense.com/ng/microsoft.public.sqlserver.server/2004/March/22/314579.cfm

Just a wild shot :

What (type of) account is serving Scheduled Task ?  Maybe it does not have the authority to access the batch or osql

the best thing you can do is to use query analyser and use the "predict execution plan" (ctrl+L)  or  "show execution plan" (ctrl+k) option to check out what it's doing.

- Any drivemapping involved ? use UNC in stead of drive-letters.

- capture your output

    --> for the batch for osql use the -o parameter (check bol)

like always, it depends on the usage of your table.

400 columns/tb  and normalized ?   I'm in no position to judge but this seems...

For the moment I'm running both at my windows xp sp2 without a problem

I started with the sql2k-personal edition, then installed my 2005...

Thank you for the replies.

For the moment, none of the applications has a specific need for a non-default collation.

The only way we may get into troubles is with our DTS-packages...

Once devs are pushed toward using parameters, they get confused as to why their sp is not reused and has many compilations when in use.

The reason is most of the...

in sql2005 use the xml-datatype

I just took a look at the way biztalk handles it, and they are using a mix of ntext...