There are a slew of books, most of them discounted now since ASP.NET is Microsoft's pushed platform. Sites like the following are great as well:

http://www.4guysfromrolla.com/

If you...

Is MSDE installed as case-sensitive? If so, scott and Scott are different, if I recall correctly.

Try connecting without the -P flag. It should then prompt you for a password. See...

How about when you attempt to log in with the sa account. Same issue?

Do you have a lot of objects that refer to other objects (views, stored procedures, functions)? If so, do they specify the owner name when they reference the object (owner.object...

I would go with the ASP page approach already mentioned. The web page can logon to SQL Server with the credentials provided by the user (if they are valid) and...

Is the MSDE Engine set for Windows authentication only?

Is scott a valid login for the MSDE in question?

There isn't a good official interpretation yet. Unfortunately, even the clarifications that have been made are open to interpretation, meaning it's really hard to nail down specifics. We've seen this...

The use of the sa account, for any reason is generally discouraged for the reasons you've heard here. It is the superuser account and has full access to do anything...

The netstat -an not showing 1433 means it isn't listening. In the SQL Server error log, do you see any errors about not being able to bind to the port?

The SQL Server listener service does two key things.

1) When a client asks for a list of SQL Servers on a given subnet, it broadcasts udp/1434 to that subnet. Any...

Hide servers does require a change to 2433, no way around that one. You can block udp/1434, which is the SQL Server Listener Service. If it's Windows 2000, you can...

If the # of clients are small, aliasing at the client level is possible. Also, if you just set up clients to connect to a TCP port, then the instance...

TempDB is a good one because you know it needs to be there. I generally only configure a user db as the default db if the user account will only...

There are hotfixes to handle malformed TDS packets, but this looks like a more reasonable solution. Out of curiousity, was there a recent change in the application or the way...

In this case, if you can afford it, you may want to bring in consulting help to check things out. There should be someone locally in Des Moines who has...