>The best course of action is find and eliminate the cause of the deadlock . The problem is that it could be some other application responsible for it. At least you can try take steps to minimize deadlocks in your application design in such cases.

There is one query that is returning that error. That covers about 95% of the errors of that type. So, it seems to come mostly from one location. This is a robot that is executing the query at every minute. It does it on a big table. After having received the statistics, it turns out that nothing has been reported on the related tables. All the INNER JOIN clauses and the WHERE clauses are indexed. However, some of the where clauses are done against character fields. Could it be that SQL Server is having more difficulties to handle query searches on character fields? In our case, the two related fields could be turned into integer. If that could be a factor, we can always convert those fields into an integer value.