Excellent, thanks for the update and glad something is working for you.

I tend to agree with Paul. I think users, or non-qualified people setting up DB servers get into trouble. If It is too busy, they ought to have a document...

And once again, I'm lost.

You need how many CPUs you need. Depends on load, and the performance you need from them.

I'm not 100% sure of all the places where ftp returns 1, but I think a "quit" or a "remote closed" will not force an error. I think only of...

You can shut down the services for the two unneeded instances in the Control Panel | Servers, and set their startup to "manual".

The problem is that ftp opens its own shell. It allows you to re-enter the password (or user), when the connection fails.

You might look at using the SSIS tasks...

There are rollforward messages in there, if they were large transactions, they could have caused some disk activity.

It seems like most people want a segregated section. That's not a bad idea, and I'll kick it around with the publishing team here.

I do like to run articles...

Check the default trace for that time. See what might have been running.

SQL will use all resources if they are needed, so I'd start by trying to determine what might...

I've avoided money as I'm not sure if provides benefits over the numeric types. It also limits me, and I prefer to not be limited. I let the application handle...

The compatibility level determines how the code is interpreted by the server. It allows keywords that did not exist in 2000 (or 7) but do exist in 2005 to still...

If you are on SQL 2000, I'd use GSquared's idea and make sure that you secure the keys well that are used in the DLLs. If you have them protected...

You need to look in the properties for each instance to determine what the memory settings are, not the Windows System Monitor.

This is a belated honeymoon with my lovely wife, so I don't think I'll be doing any work.

I'd love to come over sometime, just not sure I can get the...