Looks to me you have a problem with the email notification for backups, not the backups themselves. 

Just tossing out ideas here mind you....

How about a query that has a where clause on an XML data type?  Those seems to have the most messed up query plans I...

You could maybe force one if you have outdated statistics?  Can't say I have ever noticed one though, but not like I been keeping an eye open for it...

weeeeeeee here we go again!

From what I have seen though this is not nearly as drastic a change as 2000 to 2005 was. ...

Lookup "Database Mail" in Books Online to set up email to work from SQL 2005 (there are several "See Also" topics under it).

For notifications for a job go properties for...

oh absolutely.  I was not in a (major) crisis as I was speeding up a weekly process that had just taken way too long to finnish.

It's been my experience that user defined functions in where clauses kill performance.

Unlike say getdate(), UDF's are run against each record, while a getdate() is only run at the beginning...

I recently tried the DTA for the first time on SQL2005.  For one query it identified 13 new indexes.  I tried implementing one at a time to see how improvement was. ...

Need 3-D to make that work well! 

Congratulations!

I thought deterministic functions always had to have the schema infront of the name when called.  At least I always get the error:" 'function name' is not a recognized built-in...

(not that I recommend this, but..)

Create a linked server from your development machine to the production server and use that to create the views.

Are you really sure you want to...

Looks to me like the server name might have been hardcoded into the views.  Should be able to go into the view and remove the server name (or change it...

I think we all get burnt out from time to time.  As others have said, find something to do for fun.  For me this comes in the way of going...

From what I understand it moves with the master database.  See the "Moving System Databases" topic in Books Online.