>The firewall hasn't been changed nor has the network card--at least not by me but I'm really beginning to wonder what SP3 really does. I shouldn't really need the network card to access SQL anyway since it is installed on this workstation.

eh.. Are you running the SQL database on your workstation or are you accessing the SQL 2005 database on a server? If you run the SQL server on your workstation, then I suspect it must be an issue with virtual memory where the SQL server cannot cache the data.