>This is strange, I just checked some previous threads about this question and it seems like SET NOTIFY OFF and SET ESCAPE OFF helped some people. I wonder if there are som conditions when this may not work always.

That is strange. I don't think anything to esoteric was being done in our case:

SQLEXEC() to a SQL Server backend via the standard ODBC driver (I believe, some of this was tested by my co-worker, but I remember trying SET NOTIFY and it didn't help)

Maybe its a combo of them that works?