Hi all -

I found a few references to suggest that this is a relatively common complaint without a good solution - kind of like eczema.

Using W2003 Web Edition within VMware ESX.

I tried two methods with the same 404 result.  Precompiling didn't work, so I simply copied the entired contents of /Website to a virtual directory on a web server. NETWORK SERVICE has change access to the entire site, including the db, which I verified.  No problem connecting to the dnn db with SQL Express Manager.  web.config is same as default with some custom connection strings added (local SQLEXPRESS connection left alone). 

I suspected it might be portal alias related, but my aliases includes alaises for the production web server and are correct AFAIK.

I can visit normal HTML files (500.htm, for instance) fine, but default.aspx gives the 404.  Any ideas?  I'm suspecting some tweak I need to make with IIS in the web server edition of 2003 as I repeated this process to a local W2003 server standard edition running IIS, and it worked fine.

Many thanks-

Kel