You might want to try additional properties, because maybe the user does not have rights to VIEW SERVER STATE/DEFINITION .

Or maybe the 2 properties are not being initialized because of the location of the user database files.

Try the following alternatives:

[System.Reflection.Assembly]::LoadWithPartialName('Microsoft.SqlServer.SMO') | out-null

$server = new-object ('Microsoft.SqlServer.Management.Smo.Server') 'localhost'

$setting1 = $server.Settings.DefaultFile

$setting2 = $server.Settings.DefaultLog

$setting3 = $server.Information.MasterDBPath

$setting4 = $server.Information.MasterDBLogPath

$setting5 = $server.InstallDataDirectory