Can you correlate the errors to any events on your firewalls, DNS, or WINS?

I trust the host being used is the cluster name not a node, correct?

Yes, when the defualt port is being used SQL Browser is not used as it looks directly for port 1433.

Also when the issue occurs capture the netstat output to see what is using port 1434.

Is the data server on a cluster?

What version of sql server are you running?

Try to use <host>, <port> in the client connection to remove the sql browsing service as a...

You could try to set the sql server to do the following:

exec sp_configure 'scan for startup procs', '1';

exec sp_procoption '<procedure>, 'startup', 'on'

Have the startup proceduer execute xp_cmdshell with the program...

Is the SQL Server on a cluster?

Is the client conection to the server using a port or \\<host>\<dataserver>?

Is your environment 32 or 64 bit?

You may also want to add a config file for the packages that can be updated appropriatley for each environment.

Add a counter that increments every time the function is called and then display the value to check if it is indeed being called more than once.

The input string is probably null.

Please provide the output from the entry in sysservers and the tnsnames.ora entry.

while @i <= LEN(@String1) begin

This is executed every pass so set the length once and evaluate the length variable for performance.

Set @len = Len(@string1)

While @i <= @len etc....

Small things add...

I connect from sql server 2000 to 10G daily and is supported. Please provide the error and sql that produces the error. Are you using linked or remote servers?

Post proc as something may be in the proc that forces a recompile and subsequently introduces the elevated CPU util.