The Saga Continues

[Roger Wright]

Having successfully installed SQL Server 2008 Express on the server, I found no way to connect to it from the client. "Connection refused" was the message, despite being an Administrator on both machines, and having all protocols enabled. Since I have the Management Studio for SSEx2005 installed on the client, I thought there might be a problem trying to connect because of the version difference. I tried installing the latest 2008 version on the client. No joy there - it won't install if 2005 is present, and the installer advised me to uninstall the older version first. I did so, then re-ran the installer. Again, failure. The Performance Counters are corrupted - see this article; blah, blah. I checked the article, and it was indeed informative! But the message at the top of the page told me that this procedure doesn't apply to my OS (WinXPSP2). It referred me to the WinXP support page, which contains no equivalent article. That's not a bit surprising from my 15 years experience with Microsoft support. Since the Web Platform Installer keeps a running account of installation attempts, and subsequent tries resulted in instantaneous failure notices, I decided to wipe the slate clean, hunted down and deleted the log files, and tried again. Another failure, this time because I "have to install SP3 for this product" or some such message. The system requirements page lists SP2 as the highest required for the package. I've now spent 30 - 40 hours trying to install a product that is intended to lure beginners into buying the whole hog, presumably because it is so easy and useful to use. In the process I've now damaged VS2008 (which installed the 2005 version in the first place) on a virgin XP machine with no customizations - I just allowed the MS defaults when I installed the OS on a clean PC. All I want to do is create a simple program to track inventory items and the maintenance records for them. But it's become a career just to install the tools to do so. I thought it would be nice to use the latest version of SQL Server to implement the program, but it's looking like that was a big mistake. Now my VS2008 is crippled, with no DB installed, and I have a perfectly functional, but unreachable DB engine running on the server. By the way, the client has tons of RAM, but very little drive space and no way to improve that situation. The server has a bunch of drive space, but limited RAM, and VS2008 doesn't seem to like Windows Server 2003 very much. That's the reason for the current configuration. Can