Will do...

the other fix that was applied to this installation was the following :

Please see the below fix which was previously sucessfully applied to SQL 7.0

on NT 4.0:

SQLServer Agent hangs...

i tried setting up another account ....same thing... is there any way around this, can the sql agent be installed again ?

as far as i can see the only thing that happened was a reboot...

there was nothing else done, i have gone thru the sql error log and event log...

the password...

the services are setup to startup automatically and i have the sql server agent set to retry twice to start on a failed start.

Could the problem be a corrupt dll...

The SQL SERVER service is running under the same account with no problems and the account can be logged in under.

this SSA service was runing fine and when i checked...

So is it better at database creation to make the database size as big as it'll get ? will this have any impact ? and if not, which is better...

Thanks guys .

i found this SQL Server 2000 Operations Guide on the Microsoft site at http://www.microsoft.com/technet/treeview/default.asp?url=/technet/prodtechnol/sql/maintain/operate/opsguide/default.asp