Customer: "My car recently started to make a weird noise when I run the air conditioning."

Auto mechanic: "You really shouldn't run the air conditioning. Good drivers use the air...

Aha! The answer is in today's xkcd comic.

Good ideas about the cursor declaration. Yes, it's declared LOCAL. And although the proc does not modify the table that the cursor is reading, I'm planning to try a superfluous...

<<strange bug in the >>

Strange indeed, when I can back up the database from one server, restore it onto another server, and the behavior of the stored proc/cursor is different...

<< not enough to try to help >>

As the original poster pointed out, the code is good in the first place so even if I send you the whole application...

I am battling a similar "self-restarting cursor" . The defect

(a) occurs 100% on one server

(b) occurs 0% on another server

Pseudocode

Declare cursor as..

Open cursor

Fetch next

while @@FetchStatus

...