Thanks for the response, but:

1) a)Indexed on key I'm using to find row

b)Optimised query plan

2)Yup

3)No triggers

4)Yes

I'm tearing my hair out here......

rewrite your table to have 1 column and the bulk insert to be tab seperated, then run a process on the result table to split out the comma seperated...

I have a similar process but was disatisfied with soundex for phonetic matching, so here is an alternate algorithm:

CREATE FUNCTION dbo.DoubleMetaPhone (@str varchar(70))

RETURNS char(10)

AS

BEGIN

/*#########################################################################

Double Metaphone Phonetic Matching...

Or use sp_executesql N'select ' + @FieldList + N' from table' on 2000