Thank you, Lynn and Lowell. This helped me more than you know. The BOL explanation says that the older use of this join is not always accurate. ...

Thanks, Old Hand! I am aware of the sysinternals tools but didn't think to use any here. Great idea. I will definitely give this a shot. I...

It is enabled...I believe the "access is denied" error comes from the subsystem - a command run from cmdexec will probably have different security context than xp_cmdshell. So, I...

Hi all,

Thanks for your replies. I've done some more testing and I realize I am not correct in my understanding and reporting of the problem. The accurate description...

I haven't, only b/c this proc needs to run in 2k and 2k5 instances...

I will test it for curiosity's sake, but I will eventually need a solution that can run...

Here's some more info as I just tested a bit more:

run the contents of proc in Query Analyzer - doesn't terminate on raiserror

run the actual proc in Query Analyzer via...