page overflow

How much of a performance hit do I take if I need to take advantage of the overflow area for a varying character that exceeds that 9 K page limit? Is it best to stay away from this except for emmergencies?

the cost of overflow is relative. It all depends on how much your data is fragmented. Run showcontig to determine the fragmentation.

In general, sql2k5 is much better at handling large data than sql2k. However, if you do not need blob, don't use it.