DISTINCT works as expected only with a single column for multiple columns it checks if the row is distinct instead of checking the first column alone that as you expect...

Import the text file into a table and do the necessary formatting from there. Else you can also try with excel if the number of rows in the text file...

does n't theis

select serverproperty('MachineName') help you.

You can refer this post

http://www.sqlservercentral.com/forums/shwmessage.aspx?forumid=359&messageid=366252

A side-by-side installation would go great and as mentioned by the preious user run the upgrade advisor before you go for the upgrade.

There is a document available in msdn by Ron Talmage titled 

Database Mirroring in SQL Server 2005

That has all the scenarios...

Also you can place the tempdb ib RAID 1 disk array so that you can get better performance. Place the system and user dbs in diffferent drives.

You can use the scriprt in this link to scrpt all logins

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/246133/

Brain i have already included this in my post

 its better to run your service in domain account if your server needs to access network resources.

this says what you have...

Yes script for each db and run against it in server.

Just give this user sysadmin permission and check if that succeeds. All parameters are right but looks weird.

You can also use the CDO objects to send mails. The procedure script is avaiable in this site and that can be used.

Since you say this to be a dev machine one idea is to schedule a job to restart sql services so that memory will be cleared and will start from...

If the services run under the .Net code then this is the cause as default isolation level for .Net transaction are serializable and that would cause deadlocks. Change isolation level...

You can also use the option backup log dbname with truncate_only

then dbcc shrinkfile(logfilename,targetsize)