>If it's for reporting or similar purposes, is there any chance they would let you create and drop database snapshots?

Probably not worth the effort ... in our scenario we're pulling the data every 30 seconds, so a dirty read is really not a big deal. It's not actually "reporting", but we're providing data to another app that constantly displays information on a map. What may have been dirty 30 seconds ago will probably be fine the next time it's pulled ... I don't think a user's going to notice that on their map. <g>

Thanks for the suggestion though ... I've decided to go with IsolationLevel.ReadUncommitted. It doesn't do any locking, and that was my ultimate goal.

And the TransactionScopeOption.RequiresNew means that the new Transaction doesn't get enlisted in the existing Distributed Transactions either (which I verified with some testing), so I'm good to go now.