>OK, admittedly I don't do a lot with full text searches, though I don't recall seeing text indexes on a column so small (just 30 characters). So if anyone who has done this often wants to jump in....

Without full text index on that one, as they want to find a string anywhere in the field, I would have to use %Honda% syntax and that would time out pretty much all the time. This is why full text is required on that one for as long as they want to search within.

>- If you can reproduce this in a test environment and want to try something...try to do an UPDATE STATISTICS dbo.Client, and then try the query again. There are documented cases where a simple update of statistics will speed up queries on text indexes

The problem is once you can simulate this, this goes in memory, and unless you stop and restart SQL Server, as it becomes cached, it makes it extremely difficult to simulate again.

>- With some fine-tuning of the LIKE statement, you "might" be able to get away with using a simple LIKE and avoiding the CONTAINS.
>
>These are just educated guesses - it's up to you if you want to try them.

See above.