Microsoft has ended mainstream support for SQL Server 2000. Consequently, with the next release of Orion NPM in 2009, we will discontinue support for SQL Server 2000. We will continue to support Orion NPM on SQL 2005 and we expect to add support for SQL 2008.
The major upside of supporting only SQL 2005 and 2008 is that it will allow the Orion database to leverage many of the performance enhancements available in these versions that were not compatible with SQL 2000.