You are correct that "AGAIN" is not used. AGAIN would have to reference a table and this is, of course, a cursor.

Your suggestion is exactly what I did as a hack fix. I do it every 25 replacements. The logic is totally flawed however, as some clients have really tiny replacements that this problem never affects (but with the hack in is degrading performance). Some clients have really large replacements and 25 is not enough. Before I go down the avenue of keeping a byte count of the replacements and doing my "select into itself" every 50 meg or so, I wanted to see if anyone had ever heard of such a thing. It's totally freaky!