>The reference wasn't a lot of specific help but I will check the permissions thingy. But I do agree with his peroration.

That's my blog :).

> I really do not care for MS, but I'm constrained to work on their platforms. Generally MS stuff seems pretty poor to me ( e.g. Win 8 ).
>
>Well, enough of complaining. What I do find interesting after looking carefully at the error message is the reference to the DB being in the 2009R2 "domain". I'm trying to restore a 2008R2 DB Backup ( XXX.bak ) file to a 2012 DB. But SSMS seems to be pointing to the 2008R2 DB mdf??? Don't really understand this.

The original path is probably stored somewhere in the backup, so it defaults to it, but that location belongs to 2008R2 - which may actually have the db open (which would explain the "access denied" in the message).

Just grab the restore script, paste it in an editor window, change the folder and run it. You may get a different error message (knowing that SSMS generated scripts generally need some tweaking), but in the end this should work.