Thank you Perry for the solution - works great. It has been one of those weeks that makes a DBA know they are not paid enough...

I am now happily playing with Adventure Works in a mirror configuration on my home desktop machine. Yes, it works as advertised without the certificates. And I admit getting spoiled working in an environment with AD running reasonably well... Something I'm not ready to set up at home for various reasons.

I set all the SQL instances to run under my Windows 7 administrator account and all is well. Just didn't make the connection that a single computer is the same as a workgroup - it has been a long time since I've really needed to even consider that.

Norman