Can be tricky - usually there are some install folders left and quite often registry entries - beware of any odbc/mdac registry entries as if you mess them up you...

I have production servers running with HT and am about to upgrade to to 8 way + HT ( = 16  ). I can't say I've seen any real problems. It's...

I can think of any number of reasons you may have problems.

I suggest you monitor to see if the reads are physical or logical. Technically a repeated query should...

On a small box restricting processors is rarely effective. I'd remove any restrictions on cpu and see what happens.

If cpu 1 is not doing much and cpu 0 is overworked...

the spawn of the devil, along with cursors !!  < grin >

There are some requirements but I have it running on a p11 450 with 512 mb ram and although it complains it works well enough for eval.  I seem to...

the db_datawriter role should come with a public health warning - hope you relasie it also allows users to update system tables ?

I believe you could set up application roles...

Yup clustered indexes rebuilt, stats updated, however it does give me one possible lead

Yes you might need to defrag system tables, I'm not sure how much impact there would be of course.

How you approach this is another matter - I'm a little wary...

You should be able to identify what is causing a block, you could run a query against sysprocesses or there are lots of procs available from microsoft technet if you...

not that I'm aware of.

I'd make sure you have fully refreshed EM, it's notorious for being out of date if you don't refresh manually.

If you open up properties for your server and click on...

Large error logs are only a real problem when you want to read them! Mine hit around 80Mb a day ( using deadlock trace flags which bloat the log !)

I...

Well 8Gb for a database isn't very large, maybe the number of rows has an impact. I'd make sure your tables are definite heaps if the issue is with inserts?

Timeouts...

Technically you could never stop a sysadmin. I'd probably drop the procs if I were that worried about it or remove the sysadmin users.