>I'm really grasping here. Are there performance issues when executing activities that do not involve accessing SQL Server? Loading a Word document for instance?
>
>I'm wondering if something screwy with MDAC installed on the machine. It might be worth uninstalling whatever version is on there and reinstalling MDAC 2.6.
>
>http://support.microsoft.com/support/MDAC/26setupfaq.asp#26setupfaq
>
>You'll have to have a Windows 2000 CD to do the removal.
>
>-Mike

Mike,

This is the old, old, old, old business department. I decided to use one of my MSDN "incidents" on this problem. Over the course of the last few months, we had two different 'SQL Engineers' assigned to the case, and we sent in many megabytes of log files.

Finally, several days ago, the woman at Microsoft handling the case asked Dave if he had ODBC tracing turned on (the 'Tracing' tab on the ODBBC Data Service Administrator). He did. When he turned it off, the problem went away.

As we had played with this, I became quite certain it was not a SQL Server issue -- it was really the SQL desktop tools' slowness in accessing any server -- on his laptop or over the network.

Thanks for your help. Just wanted to close the loop.

Best regards, Steve