Ok, so I have seen this same error refernced several times on the forum but nobody seems to have answered the issue directly. I am a LAMP developer so my knowledge of a .NET and as a matter of fact this is my first foray into windows servers and .NET development. I followed the installation instructions for the INSTALL package. Just in case someone gets the same errors from another package. I followed the instructions for installing that package without Visual Studio that was linked to out of the install forum and evenrything went smoothly, I clicked through the installer and setup user and host accounts. The is up and working perfectly except... I can only view it though the http://localhost/DotNetNuke url. Any attempt to access the site through the internet creates the following error:

Server Error in '/DotNetNuke' Application.

---

Object reference not set to an instance of an object.

[NullReferenceException: Object reference not set to an instance of an object.]
   DotNetNuke.Entities.Portals.PortalSettings.GetPortalSettings(Int32 TabId, PortalAliasInfo objPortalAliasInfo) +91
   DotNetNuke.Entities.Portals.PortalSettings..ctor(Int32 tabId, PortalAliasInfo objPortalAliasInfo) +82
   DotNetNuke.HttpModules.UrlRewriteModule.OnBeginRequest(Object s, EventArgs e) +3303
   System.Web.SyncEventExecutionStep.System.Web.HttpApplication.IExecutionStep.Execute() +92
   System.Web.HttpApplication.ExecuteStep(IExecutionStep step, Boolean& completedSynchronously) +64

Now, I looked through some of the Virtual Directory settings in IIS (version 6 on a 32bit installation of windows 2003) and couldn't find if maybe I was missing something that was keeping outside traffic from accesing my site but could not identify a problem. As I said, I am a LAMP developer and though using IIS is fairly straight forward I am fairly sure my error lies in the way I have setup access to that VD.

Here are some relevent details:

Directory structure: allows annonymous access

All IP's are granted access

Users are granted read and write privilages but not executables.

I will continue to ponder the issue but if anyone has any suggestions or needs more info to help me out feel free to post. Sorry for the verbose nature of this post so I wanted to make sure I documented.

Thanks, I am going to attempt a clean installation with your recomendatations. Though it is not my intention to make DNN the focal point of my site for now. It should be in its own directory for now. Does that mean it should still be installed as a virtual directory?