George,

>I found out the hard way.< s > When this box was set up for me, they installed .NET 2003, but not IIS. When I installed it, I had a devil of a time getting everything straight. Then again, I can't remember what exactly the problem was and what the fix was. Old age I guess. I do remember writing and distributing an e-mail to our group here, but that's it.

Actually, the installation IS easy. It's getting it to work and keeping it working on a development box that's my problem. One becomes quite proficient with the Event Viewer and the MSDN Library, for sure. Just yesterday, I got a little aggressive with the MBSA tool's recommendations as to how security should be for IIS. I believed it :-( 2 hours later, it was fixed (and MBSA was happy), and I had a couple more gray ones, IYKWIM. The security/permissions layers and interaction are mind boggling. MSSQL is a snap in comparison, IMO.