I am having this problem all of a sudden on both my 2000 and 2005 consoles. In Enterprise Manager (2000), I can't see the status of the SQL Server Agent, both the start and stop appear in the right-click menu, and no account is specified in the Service startup account in the Properties. I do see the status of the servers in EM. I'm using Windows authentication.

On 2005 SSMS, it's even worse, as no status appears on the icons for the servers or for the agent.

The only change I was aware of was patching my desktop with Windows updates, so I removed those, but the behavior in SQL Server Enterprise Manager has not changed. I didn't bother trying it on the machine with SSMS.

The one anomaly is that on my 2005 SSMS, I have one server that uses a domain account as the service account and I can communicate to that server with no problem. Green arrows appear on both the server and the agent icons. None of my other servers have service accounts configured with domain accounts (but they do use Windows accounts as opposed to the system account), but that has never caused a problem in the past.

I'm hoping someone has some insight into this sudden loss of functionality.