Service Pack Install Causes Insert...into Or Select Into To Take Hours

Hi!

I am totally new to this but have access to a SQL Server (version 6.5) and am looking at the processes used on it to learn. It is being used as a reporting server and have run into a wierd problem:

We discovered that it did not have any service packs at all on it so we applied SP4 to it (Microsoft SQL Server 6.50 - 6.50.281 (Intel X86) ).

Now what took a few minutes takes **hours** to do. In particular, a particular SELECT INTO statement that has a few joins in the WHERE clause is the problem. I changed the code from the SELECT INTO and created the table and used an INSERT...INTO statement. This did not help.

This process has ran successfully on the SQL Server without any service packes for over two years and now with the SP4 applied, it takes forever.

The SQL statement that is used has also been working fine for the same amount of time. One thing that I notice with it is that the join syntax uses *= instead of the more current way (LEFT OUTER JOIN). We are also clearing the logs before running the statement to make sure the space is available. This is run against a header table with around 600,000 rows and a detail table with approx 1,500,000 rows.

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

Scott