Rather confusing, but I'd think the join process would either work, and use the new virtual name, or it will fail, and you'll need to rebuild the server.

Personally I'd probably...

Are you an admin? It sounds like a rights issue.

I have never seen SQL Server, in 17 years, delete objects. Someone did it.

If you have logs or log backups, download Log Rescue from Red gate and view them.

Did this fix things?

It's security related. You are not running the command, the SQL Server service is.

I would agree that not every table needs a Primary Key. Paul has given a great example, and if you do not need to enforce one, then you might not...

Thanks for the clarification and I'm with Barry. Do not do this as it is asking for issues.

If this were an extremely busy system and the were performance problems from...

Was the service account changed? I've seen that cause the issue.

Also check the system time on the server and other machines, including the DC. Differences can cause this.

I'd listen to Chris, but I might look to add multiple indexes on these tables. Look at the queries and see what they're using for their WHERE clauses.

Right click the server in SSMS and select Generate Script.

You need to be sure you haven't set the server to not use parallel queries or the threshold is too high. If so, you might see one CPU working hard...

It's used in full-text indexing, and contains the indexes' data from that system.

select * gets expanded to all columns. If you do not want all columns, you must specifically name the columns in the query.

Identity has nothing to do with primary key. They can be the same, but don't have to be.

What's an occurence? Not sure what you mean here.

No easy way, you'd need to decode the information and look for patterns.