Has anyone found a solution for this? I have a similiar need to
filter item level data  on a DataView web  part by target  Audience, and
have been unable to find an answer.

For usability reasons, I would also prefer to avoid using the CQ Web
Part, as well as setting item level security permissions.

To the best of my knowledge there is no way to audience  enable the DataView web
part. You could create a filter on a specific audience, but filtering
dynamically on the audiences  that the current user is a member of requires
custom code. I just finished building a custom web  part for another client as a
replacement for a listView web part  that is audience enabled.

We have been working on targeting  for quite a while and have been
working with Microsoft Premier Support. The long and short of it is
there is not any item level targeting except for Content Query web
part. We have written a custom  control that will handle our item
level targeting.

If you only have a few audiences, you could place the same web  part
multiple times on a page and use audiences  to control visibility but
it is a very limited solution.

Also just a note about audiences. As you know they can be AD groups,
SP groups, or Global Audiences but according to MS Premier support
(and our testing) only SP groups actually work.

Unfortunately I plan to have A LOT of audiences, so multiple web  parts will
not work.

Regarding your note: "only SP groups actually work."
Do you know if this is a bug that Microsoft is aware of, or is this by
design.

You can use target  audiences in a data  View web  part. I am doing it
now.
I have a data view  web part  on my main page that looks at a calendar
list on another site in my site collection. I restrict users from
seeing this except only those who I place in the Target Audience
field, which can be found when you click on Modify the Webpart, under
advanced, then look at the bottom of the advanced section and
see "audience Targeting" I put the groups there that I want to see
the web part. Only those I place there will see the Data View web
part.

You misunderstand the request - the original question regards audience
targeting at the item level, not at the web  part level.

Sorry, I see my error in interpreting your request.

I also assume you are not talking list item level permissions that
restrick who sees that particular item or document  in a list?

For the audiences, MS Premier Support is the one the told me about
the problem/limitation so I hope they will pass this on to dev
team. I asked them why the built such a nice interface in SSP and
object model to build global audiences  and not make it work  in the
product. No answer of course.

They even told me the the only way to make AD groups work
consistently is to make the part  of an SP group and not use them
directly. Since then, we have created a service that reads and xml
file for 1 to many ldap queries (against ADAM in our case) and
creates SP groups that we can then use for targeting/audiences.

Hope this will help with the audiences but item level targeting  is
another problem.

we've found Universal groups work  most of the time, even if it includes globals
and domain locals in AD.

but, I have personally seen Chris's not work - arghhh. ( I know another Chris
whose audiences  don't work - maybe it's the name :-))

Audiences are cool, but they have a way to go. The trick is to *usually* only
apply a single group to an audience  when using anything other than SP Groups.

this might have been fixed in this week's 'Infrastructure Update'. If you get
time to test, let us know.