I've been told that I cannot use Kerberos.  Are there any other options?  Is it definitely due to NTLM?

The performance isn't necessarily all bad. I had a query in which a large portion of it was splitting a delimited string into multiple columns. I originally used...

There may be even more to the story.  If you have XP SP2 installed (or likely 2003 SP1 as well) and your system admin hasn't fixed it yet, you may...