We have a United Parcel Service (UPS) application named Worldship 9.0
installed on a Windows 2003 server. Worldship creates a System DSN that
points to an SQL Server entry for its MSDE copy of SQL Server on the
installed computer. While it is hard to believe that a Billion dollar
public entity like UPS could write such a sloppy and insecure piece of code,
Worldship requires the user to be in the Local Administrators group.

I have three users in the Local Administrators group. Two of these can use
Worldship with no issues. One of the three gets an immediate failure on
the attempt to connect to the database. Since the user is a member of
Administrators group, it cannot be a system security policy or file system
permission issue (or would be highly unlikely). Microsoft Process Monitor
doesn't show anything remarkable from the UPS application when it presents
the failure to connect dialog.

What would cause one user to be unable to connect to the MSDE SQL Server
database? I am suspecting some kind of configuration issue within the MSDE
installation, but I do not see a way to administer this?

How do I further diagnose this?

--
Will

hi Will,
Will wrote:
bad, very bad..

relative connection a local or remote one)? if the users/connections granted
are all locals and the not granted one is remote, probably the MSDE instance
has been installed with disabled network protocols so that only local
connections are available..
if this is the case, run the Server Network Utility (svrnetcn.exe) and
enable the required network protocol...

another "one" could be the not connecting user has been explicitely negated
access to the instance (but this is actually a very "poor" condition)..
I do think SQL Server Management Studio Express, the free management
graphical tool for SQL Server Express 2005, available for free download at
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/d...b-9aca13141c9e
can manage MSDE as well, so you can have a look at the login's properties
without digging into Transact-SQL and oSql.exe command line tool..
Personally I never tried it with SQL Server 2000 related editions as I do
not like to "mix" version components whenever possible, so I'd go with my
own graphical management tool for MSDE, DbaMgr2k, free as well, you can
download at http://www.asql.biz/en/DbaMgr.aspx..
--
Andrea Montanari (Microsoft MVP - SQL Server)
http://www.asql.biz http://italy.mvps.org
DbaMgr2k ver 0.21.0 - DbaMgr ver 0.65.0 and further SQL Tools
--------- remove DMO to reply