Hi Jon-Paul,
i have tried your method of stopping the unnecessary services (sql snippet code,statistics, name, index, etc.). only stopping it through the daemon actually worked. the downside is the ugly red button that your instance acquires which i must admit is more annoying than the yellow triagle (silly me getting hung up on colors and shapes, just like a kid). in any event, for now i have decided to put up with 'fetching children' as the instance becomes fully operational even though it does take time (15-30 minutes). once those annoying status and instance messages, SP70 works like a charm and even with low (<40GiB) RAM delivers. i wish SAP bumped it up to 256 or at least 128 and i'm assuming i have your vote.
thanks for putting SAP feet to the fire on this.
rgds,
greg