Thanks to everyone for your help on this one. My partner installed the software at a client's site today and the software calling this object (VC++) blew up because the return was too large. In our testing, the data always had sufficient differences in the fields specified in the ORDER BY clause that it seemed to work perfectly.

I now know more than I ever wanted to about TOP xx returns!

The client is happy, my partner is happy and I could use a beer.