What does a wait type of CXPacket or Exchange mean?

A. You will only get this with SQL 7 because it only happens with parallel queries. It means that one thread of the query is waiting for a message packet from another, and the one it is waiting on is either blocked by a traditional cause or has hit some sort of parallelism bug.

CXPacket means it is waiting on a data packet - i.e. the results of an internal query is being passed. Exchange means that it is waiting on a control packet - i.e. waiting for a child/sibling process to tell you that it is finished.

If the query doesn't complete then make sure SP1 is applied as there are several parallel query fixes in SP1. If it still doesn't fix it then you have run into an unfixed bug and will need to contact Microsoft PSS and raise a bug report. You should be able to work-around the problem by adding MAXDOP(1) to the query which will prevent the query beingparallelised.