Walter,

After some 30+ hours investingating this issue here, on SQL forums, on Microsoft support and various other sites, I finally contacted Dell today in the hope they might have heard of problems with SP3 hat didn't show up in Google searches. Dell gave me a number for a Microsoft support group that handles SP3 issues. After about 40 minutes of investigation, the Support Tech informed me that SQL Server requries an upgrade in order to work properly with XP SP3.but that the SQL upgrade hasn't been released yet. I have 2 options: !) put up with the slow performance until the SQL upgrade is available, or 2) uninstall SP3 until both upgrades can be installed at the same time. One might ask why the OS upgrade was released through Automatic Updates if the correspoinding patches for installed applications are not available--but that would be a waste of time.

Thanks for your help and input on this issue. It obviously affects a very small percentage of XP users, but I would have thought others here on UT would have run into the problem. Perhaps many others have alreadly moved on to Vista. In any case, I'll be spending part of Monday uninstalling XP SP3.