The READ_COMMITTED_SNAPSHOT option can only be set if you are the only connection to the database.  So when you see that command running for a long time, it is waiting...

We've seen only one problem, but it's pretty serious.  We have gotten "Internal SQL Server Error" on some queries of the form:

INSERT INTO TableName (C1, C2) SELECT C1, C2 FROM...

We've seen this happen on a few customer databases over the past couple years, mostly when running on Windows 2000.  All the problems I have seen were fixed by service...

This article has a split function that takes an ntext parameter.  It also compares a few different ways of tackling the problem.

http://www.sommarskog.se/arrays-in-sql.html

You can use the WITH (NOEXPAND) hint to force the query to use the index.

For example:

SELECT * FROM dbo.MyIndexedView WITH (NOEXPAND)

This would also allow you to use the indexed view...

Here's a great article on MSDN about using MSDE 2000 in a web application.  It describes how to get around the connection limit by setting the Max Pool Size for ADO.NET:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/dnmsde2kwrk/html/msde2000webapp.asp