Recently I decided to move my primary machine over to Vista 64 and support customers through VPC instances. It seems like a pretty good idea with sand boxing each environment and within vista my machine can recognize all of the memory which is a plus.

Last night before shutting down for the night I looked over the updates that vista was reporting that were required and one was available for SQL Server 2005. Since I have not loaded any DB’s on my SQL instances (either 2000 or 2005) I decided to go for it and apply the changes. 

Machine was shut down for the night and when I returned this morning at 6:00 am I was welcomed with a non-working SQL 2000 instance. Going into the SQL enterprise manager and selecting my 2000 instance provided a error message that I need to use the Sql 2005 tools instead … Whaaaat …. Since I had installed the SQL 2005 64 bit instance the Enterprise manager was not available for me to go into. 

So I decided to clean house once again and revert back to the developer version of SQL Server 2005 32 bit (so that I have all of the tools available). Long and short of it, 45 minutes later I had all previous versions of SQL removed and reinstalled and was up and running. Sometimes the cost of debugging is far greater then the cost of a reinstall, at least in this case it was.

– Mark