Problem With RS2000 Export To Excel

We're using RS2000 and there are some reports that are having problems exporting to Excel after having been rendered.

The reports have no more than 30,000 rows, but are about 150 columns wide. The reports run (execute and redner) very quickly in Reporting Services, but when exporting, the "blank rendering window" (the one with the URL: "http://ServerName.Reportserver?ReportName&rs%3aCommand=Render&rs%3AFormat=EXCEL) is open for about half an hour, and the w3wp process pummels our 8 proc box (CPU between 50 and 90% for that time) and memory goes past 1.5 GIG (of the total 8 GIG) usage.

Sometimes we'll get a message asking the user to log in after about 10-15 minutes, after which it fails, other times it makes it to the dialog box asking if you want to open or save the spreadsheet. If it makes it to this dialog, it's OK, if not, it fails on the export. The resulting spreadsheets are only between 25 - 32 MG, not very big at all.

Are there any settings we can tweak to speed this up, or at the very least, be sure it always makes it to the Open/Save dialog?

Thanks in advance.

Anyone? This is quite a problem. Are there any setting changes to IIS or RS2000 that could help, here?

|||One last bump before I give up...any advice welcome.|||

I would suggest trying your scenario on RS 2005 SP2 and comparing the results. We did quite a bit of work in this area. You can download a trial version of SQL Server 2005 at http://www.microsoft.com/sql.

Thank you.