Excellent, Thanks

I'm having this issue also over the network and I cannot find anything on what might be causing this.. I can ping the servers OK from my local machine. Guess...

Excellent, going to give it a try. Thanks a ton!

I am now getting them with .NET using C#. Thanks for your help!

This is not for client side. This is being changed to T-SQL from an existing system that uses C++ to retrieve the column headers. So it sounds like T-SQL isnt...

Actually I am just going to go with the PK and additional index. Thanks for everyones help! Very much appreciated!

1 second is very acceptable, but I am just exploring other options and creating the 4 field unique index on the table versus having a 4 field PK with another...

I added the index, it comes back in 1 second now. Yes an Index Seek was used to get the count. Is this my solution? Could I just drop the...

I actually tried the count(1) method previously, but read a good article on google where that method was tested against count(*) and it makes no difference whatsoever.

No, none other than the PK generated index.