Sebastian,

My remote web admin informed me that I had full access to public and db_owner. He was unaware of 3 additional users:

aspnet_profile_fullaccess, aspnet_membership_fullaccess, aspnet_rolls_fullaccess

which he subsequentially provided full access to.

Interestingly, after setup, in Host Settings, I received this notice:

Note: You are running on an old version of the .NET Framework. Future upgrades of the DotNetNuke platform will require .NET 3.5 SP1 or later.

Perhaps this has something to do with the install issues? : )

Curiously enough, my web.config now reads:

<connectionStrings>
    <!-- Connection String for SQL Server 2005 Express -->
    <!-- Connection String for SQL Server 2000/2005-->
    <add name="SiteSqlServer" connectionString="Data Source=dataSource;Initial Catalog=DatabaseName;User ID=usid;Password=pswd" providerName="System.Data.SqlClient" />
  </connectionStrings>
  <appSettings>
    <!-- Connection String for SQL Server 2005 Express - kept for backwards compatability - legacy modules   -->
    <!-- Connection String for SQL Server 2000/2005 - kept for backwards compatability - legacy modules-->
    <add key="SiteSqlServer" value="Data Source=dataSource;Initial Catalog=DatabaseName;User ID=usid;Password=pswd" />

I have instructed him to upgrade ASP.net immediately (but I'm switching ISP's anyway :). This has been very informative, thank you for the information.