My apologies for beating a dead horse, but from looking at several
similar posts I still cannot make sense of getting MSDE to work on my
home PC to give me what I ultimately want - connection of Northwind to
my Visual Studio.

I'm, running at home a stand-alone PC, XP Pro.
I have Visual Basic .net Standard Version 2003
My Administrator Password is Admin for the computer, but I don't login
as Administrator for this (should I?)

I downloaded MSDE2000A.exe, verified that C:\MSDERelA folder existed, I
opened the Command Window and ran
C:\Documents and Settings\HomePC> setup instance="netsdk"
sapwd="password"
I get the message "Please gor to the Control Panel to install and
configure systems components"

[quoted text, click to view]

Thanks for any clues!

hi,
[quoted text, click to view]
you've better log in as administrator in order to install MSDE...
please verify, before installing, that File & Printer Sharing is enabled
(Network properties) and the "Server" service is running as well (control
panel->adim tools->services MMC snap in)..
in order to enable verbose logging of the MSDE installation process, please
add the
/L*v "c:\MsdeLog.txt"
parameter to the list of parameters you provided to the setup.exe MSDE
boostrap installer..
this will produce an about 2mb text file (for succesfully install) you can
later review in case of problem, searching for
RETURN VALUE 3
entries... about 10 lines before each entry some (sometime cryptic)
description of the problem will be reported...
--
Andrea Montanari (Microsoft MVP - SQL Server)
http://www.asql.biz http://italy.mvps.org
DbaMgr2k ver 0.19.0 - DbaMgr ver 0.63.0 and further SQL Tools
--------- remove DMO to reply

[quoted text, click to view]
<snip>

I take it that you actually typed: setup instancename="netsdk"
sapwd="password" because 'instance' is not an mdse setup parameter, and your
logon must have permission to install programs for you to install MSDE.
AFIK
Ron.