It's likely causing issues. SQL allows many characters in object names, some of which cause issues in other products, or in things like XML documents.

I can't explain the registry, and honestly you're not supposed to muck in there. The SSMS tool reads the registry, but it may be reading a different place than you're...

This seems more like production database administrator to me. Keeping dbs up, tuning them, that's production work.

Gus has a great point. You can't expect anyone else to challenge a legal issue for you.

However if you want to challenge it, what's the likelihood that your DBA will...

Yes, however you want the virtuals on separate physical servers if this is a production server.

also , be sure you have good IO. If you are making two VMs and...

It looks like you're barely shrinking it. What's the file size on disk? I might try to shrink it closer to the 13 or 14GB

Chicken thread for the soul?

The Threadinator?

I suspect this one will never get caught.

There's always a security tab for 2005 instances. You select the server instance, right click, properties. The dialog that appears has choices on the left. Security is one of those.

I haven't seen it either, but it looks like security. Can you run a DIR from that server (using xp_cmdshell or the service account)?

also, backups to network drives are a...

You should have credit now. Let me know if that's not the case.

It's the recovery model, and you would find this in the database properties, option tab.

From T-SQL,

SELECT DATABASEPROPERTYEX('msdb','Recovery')

The VSTS tool is Red Gate's under license.

There are other compare tools, but there is no best one. Try one or two, pick the one that works for you.

It's possible, but not necessarily. You'd have to check on what the load is on the server and if there are enough writes to cause a problem.

It's also a poor...

The key is dependent on which instance you are looking at. SSMS should read it from the registry, so I'm thinking that you're looking at the wrong key. Whatever is...

How are you checking this? The error log?

What is the setting in SSMS? All logins?