First, I want to apologize to the core developers who work endless hours to make this product work. Believe me, I have had comments about my code sucking at times, so I know how it feels.
I was stunned that my post was even approved, to say the least. Next time I will be careful with my words.
DotNet code is much more complex than VB6 and ASP, no doubt.
The problem I had that set me off was that I was unable to login last night for no apprent reason. I did not do anything to change the code or environment. Luckily, I had a backup of the database.
SQL Server 2005 Express was the main culprit. I attached the database that comes with DotNetNuke. The day I did that, everything worked fine. My dedicated server was rebooted the next day and DotNetNuke would not load.
So I followed the instructions on these forums and edited web.config to use another login. Then, I bring up the browser and DotNetNuke brings up the Install screen, this time. I close the browser, but the damage was done to the encryption keys in web.config, as they reset. I did not realize that. I kept trying to log in, with no avail.
Finally I used the backup for web.config and still could not login. I then tried simple password, editing the databse and still no luck.
All these ideas were from the forums. There were no solutions that worked, so I got frustrated to the max. I had invested over 80 hours on this thing and no results.
Finally, this afternoon, I took the backup database and overwrote the live install, verfied web.config settings and then everything worked. I made some addtional tweaks to the portals (no code changes to source code at all).
My only suggestions to the core team may be to make it difficult to change the encryption keys, or make it easier for the admin to rest all the passwords by making a temporary setting change in the database. Then all users are notified that their password has been reset (including Host).
Thanks for your hard work and no disrespect to anyone here.
Thanks
Tom