>>Post your code and I bet someone can spruce it up.
>
>It's way too complex for anyone to just look at and see what's wrong; I'm still untangling it. There's an SP that refers to several views. The view that seems to be the chief villain uses a couple of other views. At the moment, I think the key issue is a self-join involving an enormous table, but I'm not even sure that's the main problem.
>
>Tamar

Take a look at this blog post

http://blogs.lessthandot.com/index.php/DataMgmt/DBProgramming/MSSQLServer/t-sql-wednesday-21-t