That's the first time I've heard that (12 table join being 'not that excessive' that is).

I took your advice and there is one table scan in the execution plan and I can't get rid of it. All of the foreign key fields are indexed so I can't figure out what the deal is. Maybe because the table is so small right now (10 records) SQL Server makes the choice just to scan instead of seek, dunno, large table optimization is new to me. My concern is when this table starts collecting the hundreds of thousands of records that is in its future ... what happens then.

Thanks for the help everyone,

CT