Gordon,

I now see what you are doing and you are right about the frontpage extensions for your setup although I'm still not sure why you have the need to access your site from your client via Visual Studio. As far as your permissions go it seems correct except that when I set permissions on my installations the checkbox for "inherit from parent the permission entries ..." is automatically checked for me and I just leave it alone - not sure if that's really an issue here.

I have had problems once and awhile with not being able to log on host or admin but was able to register as a new user and log on that way.  If you are able to do that then you can try to open your "Users" table in your database and change the IsSuperUser entry from false to true. That has worked for me in almost every case.

Sorry if I haven't been more helpful but I have to travel in the morning from Thailand back to Ohio. Good luck in your endeavor and I'll check back in a couple of days.

Mike