Selecting Version Of Remote SQL Instance Into Local Variable?

Hello all,
I'm a bit new to SQL Server and T-SQL (my background is in DB2), so hoping you can help me with this. I'm writing a T-SQL script that's hopefully going to scan a bunch of SQL server instances and record the results. We've got a mix of SQL2K and SQL2K5 instances, and for part of my script I only want to run something if the remote instance is SQL2K.

I'd tested this on my local PC with several instances created and it worked fine. When I try and run it for instances located on other servers it barfs :eek: . From what I've found from looking up the error message it looks like I've got myself a loopback -- but I don't know how to get around it - any ideas please?


DECLARE @tempdata TABLE (scratch sql_variant)
DECLARE @debug tinyint
DECLARE @server sysname
DECLARE @version varchar(20)

SET @debug=1
SET @server='SQLSERVER_INSTANCE'

INSERT INTO @tempdata (scratch) EXEC ('[' + @server + '].master.dbo.sp_executesql N''SELECT SERVERPROPERTY(''''ProductVersion'''')''')
SELECT @version = convert(varchar(100),scratch) from @tempdata
DELETE FROM @tempdata
IF @debug>0 BEGIN PRINT @server + ' is running SQL Server version: ' + @VERSION END
IF charindex('8.00',@version) > 0 BEGIN
PRINT 'SQL2K-only code goes here'
END


The error I get is:
OLE DB provider "SQLNCLI" for linked server "SQLSERVER_INSTANCE" returned message "The transaction manager has disabled its support for remote/network transactions.".
Msg 7391, Level 16, State 2, Line 1
The operation could not be performed because OLE DB provider "SQLNCLI" for linked server "SQLSERVER_INSTANCE" was unable to begin a distributed transaction.


I get this error running from a SQL2K5 instance against both SQL2K or SQL2K5

TIA, moff.