Hi, yeah I thought that also , but it happened 3 times and I'm not sure where a rouge process would popup from 3 times in a week when there's...

8 Processors and set to no parallelism , ie use one processor

On the back of that I should mention that there is another query run by the clients that uses two less fields that runs in 3 seconds or less while...

Yeah, ok All db files are on a SAN and nothing out of the ordinary happening there, same with process etc I would expect the same query run via QA...

Inside Microsoft SQL Server 2000 by the folk at redmond explicitly states answer 3 as being the way to do it. => It should be marked as correct for those...