Response to myself...

A couple of suggestions.
- it seems that if you use .TransBegin and .TransComit things speed up quite a bit faster.
- Apparently there's a way to 'disconnect' and 'reconnect' the recordset to the database? Lessens network traffic? I don't know how.
- The Size of your data may be an issue. 'Buddy' sends big 'chunks' of data and has no problem, but when he tries our many 'smaller chunks' he sees the same problem we are having.

Is sending MS SQL Server lots of smaller chunks of data fair to compare?