I would have to say yes, a lot of testing goes into it, because in all the times I have installed DotNetnuke-- going back to 1.10, and that has probably been on the order of 50-55 times -- I have never had a problem when I walked through the process as laid out in the documentation.

The only problems I usually see with installations come from:

1. Permissions Issues
2. Using a squirelly collation on SQL server
3. Not configuring SQL server properly
4. Not using a properly configured user on SQL server
5. Improperly configuring IIS

I appreciate the replies, and I agree that the points you make sound fair enough.

Here are the facts the way I see them:

When I posted this thread yesterday I got an error message from www.dotnetnuke.com telling me that the "add/edit script" was unavailable and to please try again later... However my posting did go thru. I don't have any weird software installed on my computer and no problems posting or blogging on any other site, so this makes me feel like there are some code issues that I have no way to control, and they need to be corrected.

The times that I have attempted to install DNN have been plain vainilla... No SQL, other than SQL 2005 Express, which comes with Visual Web Developer 2005 Express. No permission issues, nor fancy deviations from the defaults. I remember several times when I tried installing 2.x and 3.x versions, the installation did not finish for some reason and there were forums that documented the exact problem I was having (as well as many other users,) but the suggested solutions did not work. I gave up on it for a while. Now I am trying to get back into it because I have heard friends rave about what they have done with DNN, and here I am. 4.7 install, plain vainilla StartKit, all default settings, Database.mdf default, the installation output in VS 2005 shows this:
Validation Complete
========= Build: 1 succeeded or up-to-date, 0 failed, 0 skipped ==========

However, the web page that comes up after that seems to be progressing fine along the rest of the install, but none of the images show up; just text. I clicked the "Next" link on every page and got successful results on the configuration and test of the database conectivity, but when it got to the "Run Database Installation Scripts" page, an error window pops up telling me that there was an error on line 106, and the animated gif (the only image that did show up) keeps scrolling. The instructions say that the "Next" button will be enabled once the scripts are installed, but the "Next" button is clickable right away, although nothing happens when I click on it.

I am running Windows XP SP2, fully patched, plenty of RAM and HD space, Symantec AV,

Please tell me what I am doing wrong. Thanks.

Jorge