Hi John,
The tests show results which are quite surprising. Although the debugging you did show that the problem might be with the WHILE..DO loop, but it is looking very fine to me..
Before we conclude that the problem is with the loop, one more thing you can try is put this statement inside the loop as the first line after DO
SELECT :VAR_2 FROM DUMMY;
and then call the procedure.
If the loop is getting executed then it should open up result tabs with the value of VAR_2 for each iteration. This would confirm whether the loop is getting executed or not.
--
Shreepad