—*** NEW INFORMATION - UPDATE ***—
Hi All,
I really appreciate all the WebIntelligence configuration suggestions offered above. Thanks to all who pondered. Special thanks to all who responded.
Update: Our issue appears to have been RESOLVED!
The solution was a patch to the 6.1b International version supplied by Business Objects.
We’re still in hold-our-breath-with-fingers-crossed mode, but the results thus far are promising.
Our best indicator has been a Webi report querying a single dimension table in our data warehouse. This query forces a table scan of the table, and the table contains 5.5 million rows. (Our data warehouse now contains 1.6 TB of data and runs on SQL Server 2000.)
This WebI report was executing in 15 - 45 minutes prior to the upgrade and patch. The current runtime is between one and two minutes. 
Again, we’ve only had the patch installed in Production for a few days. Before that, we tested both 6.1b - and then the patch - for a week.
We’ve seen one or two quirks that seem to be related to the 6.1b full client, but we have yet to isolate them further. And because all our 50 current users hit Webi, we’re not very concerned about full client issues.
Thanks,
Andy
PS - Happy Birthday (a little early), BOB!
*** NEW STUFF ***
The patch we received from Business Objects continues to perform well as of this update (12 Aug 2004). The patch number is 286 and was written for the International version (only - we asked about the English version) of WebIntelligence 6.1b for IIS and ASP on Windows.
One unexpected (positive!) side-effect is a performance boost in our data warehouse replication processes. It makes sense: the unpatched Webi v6 would bring back pieces of data in “a million little chunks.” The new version brings it all back at once.
An analysis revealed we have reclaimed the time previously lost to hard drive seek times. Between reads for the “million little chunks,” the SQL Server engine would pick up the heads, find the next place to write transactionally replicated data, and begin writing - only to be interrupted again by another request for 10 more rows to read. 
The short version is: selects and updates, inserts, and deletes sped up - markedly.
Business Objects Tech Support came through for us on this one.
Andy
aleonard 
(BOB member since 2003-10-20)