In the above image what you can see is that I have a table, that when I query a max value of a field from it, I get different results based on a where clause that the rest of the queries seem to rule out as irrelevant.
Back end is MSDE 2000, front end is application written in VB.NET 2008, verification performed using SSMS 2008R2 attached to MSDE instance over VPN.
It is a closed system from application development, however if I could correct whatever is causing this I believe both DB and application would resume operation.
The problem is is causing is when it requests Max([record_index]) + 1 where the [station_id] = 10, the value is coming up as a record that already exists in that table, and the insert is failing because of a unique constraint.