rob/bret, thanks for the response.
i will come back to you about your first two posts as i still think i have things to nitpick with.
but with regards 'kill <spid> with status only', how accurate is the calculated time for rollback? from what i remember from my own experience the value returned was hardly accurate. once i remember it gave an approximate time of a few hours for the rollback to complete, but the actual tran rolled back within a few minutes.