>I am creating some cursors on a SQL-Server

Are you creating server-side cursors, temporary tables, or permanent tables?

>Is there some stored procedure that will just return this number from some system table??? It takes quite a while especially on tables of 500,000 or more records

SQL Server has the @@ROWCOUNT global variable. The variable is scoped to the connection and is affected by every statement set to the server. You might find it unreliable.

Creating a non-clustered index on the table will improve the speed of the SELECT COUNT(*).