>I am not familiar with the failover stuff but what would your standard connections strings look like if you were not using Mere Mortals?

Good question. I might look like the same as the connection string for Mere Mortals. So nothing special. I haven't tested it with a standard connection string yet.
For the failover stuff only a parameter for the "Failover Partner" should be necessary. But I tried to add all the different versions of Failover_Partner to my web.config and always get the error message, that this parametername is unknown.

Regards
Thomas