A: 

THE ISSUE STEMMED FROM A SILLY 'SET NOCOUNT ON' LINE IN THE TOP OF MY STORED PROC. APPARENTLY THIS BREAKS THE QUERY NOTIFICATION. It seems that this statement is seen as a result set and that the second, actual query statement invalidates the result set resulting in a notification. This was very hard to find and nowhere in the MSDN documentation until I added the comment. Hope this saves someone else the miser I went through!

dferraro