>It could, assuming you had SQL Server Express on the same box and the real server is someplace else. I prefer to put the full server name in the *.config file. I tend to just comment out the unused connection strings (for example, I have two entries in our web.config file, one for my dev. box, one for the server. I will selectively comment out one or the other depending on what I'm doing).

Thanks again. I'll fix the config and app settings files. We also found that it worked in production OK using its own web.config. However, we found couple of errors, so we reverted to the previous version anyway.

I will try to fix all these errors locally first now (some of them are a result of merging work from multiple developers and stepping on each other).