Thanks for the suggestion.

I double checked, and as I thought the account I'm installing under is a mamber of Domain Admins.

I'm logged in as an administrator on the server (but not THE Administrator account) and the password I have should meet the complexity standards for SQL.

Thanks for the reply!

Here's a bit more information:

My W2K3 server is an AD controller.

I have seen some stuff around that this was a problem with the preview version, but that it would be...

I'm no SQL expert, but from being a programmer it looks to me like it's a problem where the parser is intrepreting the backslash as the beginning of an escape...