David,
Thank your for your efforts!
Yeah, as a developer, I hate solving problems by 'throwing hardware' at it, but with deadlines, you gotta do what you havta. Hopefully I'll stumble upon something later that will explain it...
Mark

>I was still contemplating alternate solutions for you.. what you are doing is just plain hard and very CPU - I/O intense. I'm glad throwing hardware at the problem helped get it back to acceptable performance.
>
>>Just thought you might be interested to know that after tripling the RAM on the machine (to 384 Meg), the process buzzes by normally (within resonable time). We're pretty convinced that there is some sort of memory limitation on large tables - nothing else seemed to work noticably.