These kind of questions are designed to get an idea of how much experience you have with using the product. Everyone's experience will be different so there is no...

Looks like you have two 2005 instances installed, both of which are SQLExpress. Then you have the SQLExpress tools installed for 2005 and 2008. If you were...

The backups are just files so can go on any server, doesn't have to be a sql server. But - it could be better to detach the databases and...

Not really. The SQL install process guides you through setting up a virtual SQL Server name and IP address - the name is used by your applications to connect...

Could this be due to blocking? Have a look in Activity Monitor or run sp_who2 and sp_lock to see if there are transactions blocking which can cause timeouts.

Not sure what you mean. Are you looking to keep two schemas in sync or trying to compare schemas to find differences?

running select serverproperty('LicenseType') on 2005 always returns DISABLED. The only way to keep track of the licence types is to do it manually.

The constraints are there to protect your data, don't disable or remove them to get the data in. What you need to do is either import the data into...

you can use profiler to trace the queries being run and you can also get it to generate a script to enable tracing.

In SQL 2005, use the following: select * from sys.master_files

Both Access and SQL Server require write access to the drives they run from so running from CD/DVD won't work.

I haven't used Access for a long time but...

A few comments:

Why have 3 active and 3 passive nodes? Are you assuming that all 3 active will go down at the same time?

Table partitioning will work...

Reporting Services can do this for you. It provides a web based report which can be exported.

you can see what databases are mirrored by looking in sys.database_mirroring.

If you are intending to run all the databases on the same server when it gets to production I'd go for a single instance unless either you want the databases...