Our Hibernate 3.1.3 application started acting up. The symptoms were after a call to Query.list(), one of the queried tables was being locked. This is strange, given that the operation is read-only, and that it only happened on one of the many such calls. The problematic query was probably the largest query in the system. We ran the application in three different environments, but it only failed in one. The failed environment was running SQL Server Developer Edition 8.00.194 (RTM). The two successful environments were running SQL Server Developer Edition 8.00.2039 (SP4). Our hypothesis is that this accounts for the difference. Early versions of MSDE had issues closing cursors -- perhaps we've been bitten by that.