Thanks, Josef... I'm on my way to work... will take a whack at it tonight.

Forgot to ask... can you provide a couple of file names from each directory?  And, Lowell...

Actually, it does...

    IF OBJECT_ID('TempDB..#tablename','U') IS NOT NULL

  DROP TABLE #tableName

Nisha,

Why the conversions?  2 is already an INT and RowID is likely an INT if the column is an IDENTITY column...

Yes... it IS a lie... and there is no lower form of life than someone who lies especially on a resume.  But, it's not that person's fault they (s)he got...

You're ignoring bad rows? 

You really want to get good at performance tuning?  Start answering questions on this forum   And learn how to make millions of...

Tim,

Thanks for letting my "rant" in... I don't know if we can help you with that nasty cursor, but if it's not hundreds of lines long, maybe you should post...

Tim,

This isn't going to help you a bit... I just want to make a point to any others that may read this because it's been an ongoing battle on this...

Ok... let's stop pussyfooting around... your original post, with the correct indexes on the columns, runs as fast with the Order By as without... it screams.

Now you throw the curve...

The limits in SQL Server 2000 are a bit bigger than that (from BOL)...

ntext

Variable-length Unicode data with a maximum length of 2³⁰ - 1 (1,073,741,823) characters. Storage size, in...

You're still missing the point... you provided certain base data in your original post and an output sample that cannot be...

I'm just asking for you to provide the correct output...

Your database is "case sensitive"?????

Passing any parameters to the sproc?  If you are, post the code so we can take a peek for ya...

You're simply trying to do too much at once in each section... you must "Divide and Conquer" if you expect to get any performance out of this.

First thing I notice...

Cool... thanks guys.