Is that a senior admin? If so, it seems low, but it might be ok in that area.

I used to randomly allot my time between projects (in corporate work), varying the amount per day, adding them up to 8 or 10 randomly. Just to make life easier....

You don't want to do this. The backup process is extremely intolerant of network delays and you'll find it failing for no apparent reason. You'd be better off backing up...

Sounds like something weird, maybe an SP (SQL) difference?

Can you save as a file and reopen on the workstation?

Haven't seen it and although I rarely reboot, it hasn't happened to me. Are you running as admin on the XP machine? Maybe they're not being saved?

yes, this was addressed a long time ago by MS.

If the users are employees, or authenticated by your AD, then you need CALs for all the employees/devices OR you can...

When a job is running, it will get put into sysjobhistory with a status. BOL lists the various status values.

I think you'd need to scan all the tables for the FKs and then somehow alter them. I'm not sure you can just add not for replication, but I could...

Why the waitfors?

The code appears to wait, you just need to take a parameter for the month, or two, like

declare @mn char(2), @yr char(4)

declare @start datetime, @end datetime

select @start...

Do you have column names in the XLS?

Lee has a great summary although I'd avoid the linked server item. If you're a public corp I'm sure it would violate Sarbanes Oxley standards.

I've always done backup/restore, but the...

I think Phil is right. There's on date info in sysindexes. There might be something encoded, but nothing I know of.

You're going to have downtime, so the easiest thing is to backup master and msdb.

Then detach all user dbs.

Now uninstall

Reinstall

attach dbs

restore msdb

restore master.

And be sure you apply patches/SPs before restoring master adn msdb.

Thanks for the update. Perhaps the multiple growths were causing some error. If you get a chance to test it on another box, we'd love to know what you observe.