zero to none is an oxymoron
you mean slim to none
As for the problems with i7s and 2008 basically no one has done any research into it past a few changes done in COEP which don't really fix it on either... though the i7s is probably something to do with the updates with parallel processing added in the i series processors, and i've said before that 2008 is most likely because of the changes made to the handling of shared memory access practices, both of which no one on this forum are ever going to fix or even bother looking at...
so yeah, xeons/opterons/phenoms and 2003, if your datacenter doesn't offer 2003, change datacenters.
and tbh you shouldn't be at a datacenter that offers i7s as serious servers anyway considering they are more for general desktop and gaming usage as Xeons kick the ass of i7s for the high-load data environments you get from a server (obviously that doesn't include the i7 980x considering it has 6 cores).