"lock request time out period exceeded" Error When Trying to See DB Hierarchies

I'm having problems with a database.

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I can run basic queries, albeit much slower than normal.

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When I attempt to view the hierarchy trees for tables, views, or procedures in SSMS Object Explorer, I get lock request time out period exceeded.

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My SSRS reports that run on objects in this database are no longer completing.

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Jobs associated with procedures stored on this database also do not run.

I tried using sp_who2 to find and kill all connections on the database, however this has not solved the problem.

What is going on here? How can I resolve this?

I got this problem when I began an explicit transaction in which I created a table in tempdb from a script running in another database (not tempdb). When I committed the transaction, the commit didn't seem to release the lock on the table I had created in tempdb.

Thanks to this page, I USEd tempdb and executed DBCC OPENTRAN and got the SPID of the connection to tempdb that was causing the lock. Then I KILL to kill it.

Not very graceful, and I lost all the information in the table I had created in tempdb, but that was OK in my case.

StackExchange Database Administrators Q#23335, answer score: 13