Ok... so did that do the trick for you or what?  A little feedback goes a long way around here...

The problem is the code highlighted in red... remove it and it will work fine.

UPDATE clean

SET clean.branchid = branches.branchid

FROM clean

INNER JOIN branches

ON clean.ppi = branches.ppi

Although the following works fine...

 SELECT CAST(LEFT(@TestXMLTime,22) AS DATETIME) works just fine...

Hey Remi!  My car won't start... can you tell me what's wrong with it?...

   Waddaya mean you want to pop the hood?

Hard to tell with the criteria for the "ON" clauses missing...

Yep... temp tables and all that other stuff work fine on tiny tables containing 2000 or even 10000 rows... try it with a million rows...

This, of course, can be done more easily...

HOW does it save time?

You bet.  Thank you for the feedback.

It may be a bug in TOP that someone recently reported for SS 2k5.  Stupid little things like...

SELECT TOP (75) PERCENT *

FROM sometable

Yield the incorrect results... but not all the...

Here's a fully functional example, using the Northwind database, of how you could do it in SQL Server... most folks turn it into a function....

    USE NorthWind

DECLARE @RegionToFind VARCHAR(20)

   ...

>>just add the genre to the genres variable

Are you looking for the Genres variable to contain a list of space separated Genre's? or ???

Why do you want to do the Order By in a View?  If you want a different order than what the view presents, you would end up with 2 ORDER...

GETDATE() won't work inside an SS2000 function because of silly rules about being non-deterministic and all... you need to make a view for a simple GETDATE() ...

 CREATE VIEW...

Newline could also be just CHAR(10) or CHAR(13).  Have you tried replacing each one at a time?

Yes... but this looks like homework... would you mind showing us what you've tried?