It has the following roles: 

public, owner, accessadmin, securityadmin, ddladmin, backupoperator, datareader, datawriter, denydatareader, denydatawriter

and it has select insert update delete dri permissions on every one of the tables. 

However, the user is not the creator - could that be the problem? 

The only other thing that I can think of is, when I set up the virtual directory, we did not allow "execute exe" as an option. .. Unfortunately, we have pretty restrictive IT policy here, so unless I KNOW it is the problem, it is alot of hassle to get back into the server room to change that (I have rights to manage the IIS and such remotely, but cannot created sites or change site permissions)

Thanks!!

Right-clicking on enterprise manager, it actually WON'T let me log on with the username and password as is.  Nor will is let me log on as our previous username, which did work for the ibuyspy portal - or even my own username, which I know should work because it is the default log in for my enterprize manager. 

It would seem there is an issue with remote login, yet the same parameters for our IBuySpy portal work.    Our IBuySpy portal is actually on the same machine, and this install of DNN is created as a virtual site below it (I have accounted for the different versions of .NET)

My last guess is that there is an issue with our SQL not being on the default port - but where in the web.config file would I need to change something to accomodate that?

Thank you all so much for your help.