I have heard of this issue with several bulk  import programs but have not heard of a solution  other than a script that runs afterwards to change  the status.

Would anyone happen to have this script that they wouldn’t mind sharing with me?

Okay we got past the problem  describe below, but now we are running into a different problem.

We are in the middle of a bulk  import of 90,000 sponsor locations into a sharepoint  list. However it is only doing about 1 to 2 records per second which is extremely slow! If you calculate the speed based on 2 records per second you’re looking at about 12.5 hours (which is dumb)! What is even more dumb is that this import  has been going since 10:30am yesterday and as of this morning there were only about 6000 records that had been uploaded! Why on earth is this going so slow!?! Can anyone help us at all?

Sharepoint lists were not designed to house this many entries. As a personal best practice if I think that a list  is going to have more than a couple thousand entries I put  the information  in a SQL database. You can then write a web part to expose the data in the SQL database to be viewed and edited. If you are using MOSS 2007 you should be able to get away with having more list entries. However, still 900,000 list item entries would still be best served from a database exposed through sharepoint.

Microsoft says that "The interface for enumerating list items does not perform well beyond a few thousand items." You can view the document here www.microsoft.com/.../stsb07.mspx?mfr=true The new version allows for more items but 900,000 items is still WAY to much.

Large list  support is one of the three remaining platform busters from
my original dozen. The other two are relational lists and OLEDB access
to lists (which is quasi accomplished using Access 2007).

I’m glad I found out now before for I got all 900,000 into a list. So my next question then is do you know of any websites or good documentation on how I can connect sharepoint  to an SQL table and view it within sharepoint so that I can change  and modify records in the portal?

You use a connection string just like you would in any other ASP.NET application. Are you a developer? If not you will probably need to get a sharepoint  developer in on how to assimilate this project.