> I'm impressed with your persistence in defending this blatantly
> broken behaviour!

And I am impressed by you wasting time convincing yourself
how Firebird is bad, instead of trying to understand how it works
and how to use its advantages.
(seems like my experience playing Monkey Island will come handy soon :-)

Apart from advices you already got, here is another one:

Create linked list of your records.
Just by adding one field into your table and three triggers
you can get solution much better than with M$ - it will not block
transactions unnecessarily, and it will not require primitive read
committed transaction mode.

Ivan