Brian,

Thanks for the advise. I was not able to connect to the database using query analyzer, I was getting the exact same error message as the DNN install error.  Here is what I found/did to correct the error.

First I created an sql server alias and gave it “named pipes” protocol, my default was tcp/ip, then I accessed the server and granted both windows authentication and sql server authentication, default was windows authentication. Then I restarted the sql server.  I changed the server name in the web.config to match the new alias and presto!  Every thing worked great!  Clean install.

Now all I need to do is learn how to use this nifty software!

Thanks

Ken