I think the exceptional DBA has to go beyond the advanced understanding of the technology and get into the realm of interpersonal dynamics and business decision making.

Do they convey...

This maybe a long shot, but I had corruption in msdb database on sql 2005, maybe running dbcc checkdb on it would be one more thing to check.

-Chuck Lathrope

Could you explain what the purpose of having the second instance is for? Sounds like you should look into Active/Active cluster.

-Chuck Lathrope

I had this same issue before. I had to create an alias on the server and use the default 1433 port. Seemed weird to me that I had to do...