Although all the suggestions above have their merits, I doubt they are actually the problem.

When you say you have people connecting from all over the country, what do you mean? ...

I would always take the SCSI drives over IDE.  In my experience the disk I/O is the biggest bottleneck in the system and IDE is a massive problem for a...

I've used this before:

http://www.winnetmag.com/SQLServer/Article/ArticleID/21071/21071.html

Works like a charm.

I could be wrong, but my guess is that your DSN is defaulting to named pipes.  Change you cliconfg.exe to default to TCP/IP.

Is your Primary key not the same as the clustered index that the ADHOC query is selecting?  If not, I wonder if you should take a look at why query optimizer is...

The answer of course always depends on the database, but I chose to restore to a different database and then analyze whether you can move the rows over.  I wouldn't...

Just a question.  Why wouldn't you just store the path to the Image file in the database?  The database isn't an optimal place to store this type of information.

You wouldn't want merge replication in this scenario given that it is a disaster recovery scenario.  Transactional replication would cost the least in overhead.

The other issue is that Log Shipping...