Hmmm ... ok I'm out of ideas. Looks like you've tried all the avenues I can think off.

I'd say the next step would be a support call to MS

Ok, with that server setup you shouldn't run into any of the limitations imposed on the lower editions.

When you try to start them manually is this done via EM, or...

Strange.

Couple of things that should have been covered up front. What OS and SQL version are you running?

Are these jobs scheduled, or are you manually starting all of them?

Take a look at the Qn in this article about Concurrent Sql Server Agent Jobs

http://www.microsoft.com/technet/technetmag/issues/2006/10/SQLQA/?related=/technet/technetmag/issues/2006/10/SQLQA

Don't follow contrived "best practice" if it doesn't suit your business requirements. In the document referenced by Alzdba, under the heading "Test Methodology", they basically admit to cooking the tests...

The magic number is 9.

Put this link in your favourites

http://www.asciitable.com/

Glad you found a solution that worked for you. Just be aware that the sp_OA* procedures used in that article are notrious for memory leaks.

Why would you be using an ExecuteSQL task? If you've defined the connections, then just add a datapump between them.

If you're stuck on using the ExecuteSQL task then you'll need...

Another option for email is XPSMTP available from http://www.sqldev.net

For the data driven query, have you specified both the insert and update statements?

Is there a specific reason why you can't pump the data to the source and the run...

At a guess I'd say that the profile that the DTS package is running under doesn't contain the INI file setting in it's environment.

How about just passing the INI file...

The SQL Statement you execute in DTS won't know about the connections defined within the package.

Best way to do this would be to have a Datapump task transfer the data...

Execution plan would also be useful

Why would you go to all this trouble? Just setup Database Mail instead it uses SMTP.

You'd just compress the file before attaching it. There are a number of command-line compression tools. One we've used extensively is GZip (www.gzip.org).