We had almost identical experience. The first time it was run, the query itself exceeded the standard timeout period, (middle tier, not db-level); involved some heady I/O & CPU....

sp_refreshview is a way to refresh non-schemabound views when their underlying tables change.

Agreed, functions defined with a fieldlist are much preferred to ones defined with select *. ...

Well, may not relate, but we had a similar problem with certain sql servers unable to resolve the sql mail email address. On the servers w/ the prob, see...