I'm not going into details on this one. It's been couvered totally already.
RBarry, it is ok to refer to your series of article on how to lose the cursors and just add the remark: If you cannot use these techniques to avoid them, I guess you would be allowed to use them.
The start of this wonderful series can be found at SSC at: http://qa.sqlservercentral.com/articles/T-SQL/66097/
Unless I don't know, the inverse of positive is negative