>Maybe I'm not reading what you're saying right, but Varchar and nVarchar are indexable w/o full text indexing. Searching for things starting with whatever works fine on varchar and nvarchar.

If you try to search for an exact match on one of those fields, you will get:

"The data types text and varchar are incompatible in the equal to operator."

As for Like 'Someting%', this was not as optimized for the search as when I use it for a Char field. But, in my case, I was not interested with the Like. So, searching for an exact match with a varchar field, we are stucked. Is this your findings as well?