John,

>Again, it may be semantics. MS is very quick to correct folks when they make the misstep of calling MSDE a limited form of SQL. I don't know what that reason is. I think it is best to be as correct as possible when making alleged statements of fact.

It may very well be a "marketing line" more than a technical distinction, since there are other indications of sameness, such as MSDE and SQL 7 sharing registry entries about code page, leading to a situation where you cannot have MSDE and SQL 7 on the same machine with different code page settings.