What Chirag said. You have to use single quotes for your string comparisons, so they need to be escaped. The statements should be:

[font="Courier New"]...

+ 'AND a.effective_from <= '''...

Look in the usual places - the Windows Event Logs and the SQL ERRORLOG. The Windows Event Logs would be the first port of call. They should have...

Interesting.

The only other thing I can think of is, as you have stated, some other service that SQL Server implicitly relies on hasn't started up in time. Maybe NetLogon...

Start looking at sp_help_fulltext_tables and sp_msforeachdb. Something like:

sp_msforeachdb 'use [?];exec sp_help_fulltext_tables'

Note that sp_help_fulltext_tables is deprecated in SQL Server 2005, replaced with sys.fulltext_catalogs.

There's absolutely nothing in the ERRORLOG?

How about the Windows Security Event Log? Any login failures reported there?

Is the service account enabled and not locked out? Has...

I have no answer for that. Not something I would waste too much time looking into. As long as you can get it working without band-aids (setting SPNs...

It shouldn't need it. I have several servers that have different accounts for Server & Agent, and only the server service account has an SPN.

Here's a snippet from a documentation script I have. Note - if a database has never been backed up, it won't appear in this list. That can be...

Are there any other messages? Seems kind of vague.

What is the full drive + path returned? Is it valid? Does the SQL Server service account have rights...

Here's how I see it:

1. you have defined a user Linked_ASRC on DISB to have access to a table

2. you have configured the linked server on DISA to...

There's a particular way to setup SPNs when using SQL Server with a domain service account. Try running the setspn utility as a domain administrator as follows:

[font="Courier New"]setspn -A...

I have 2005 Developer Edition installed on my laptop and use SSMS to administer Standard & Enterprise with no hassles.

The only issue I have come across is in...

Can you ping the server by name and IP?

Can you create an ODBC connection to it at all?

Has the client ever been able to connect to the SQL Server or...

Presumably the usernames have the format DOMAIN\User. They will be Windows users who are a member of a Windows group that has been granted rights in SQL Server. ...

I have always considered the resource database a system database. Hell, the system can't operate without it for a start.

And regardless of the various logical & physical...