Hi Thomas,
That advice was really only about making it as simple as possible for Darrel, given his scenario on a Webhost4life shared account and myself not knowing his background knowledge.
Among several reasons, I have found MSSQL2000 to be the more portable db across the different WH4L accounts.. and anyone who gets serious about DNN will definitely be upgrading or shifting away from the basic shared account there.
Also, when I recently upgraded to 2005, I ran into trouble with a DNN bug in 4.37 affecting the event logs, which is supposed to be fixed in 4.40. However, without being able to confirm this, I elected to tell Darrel to start with 2000.
And also, if necessary, he can use Enterprise Manager directly from his hosting control panel to examine his 2000 db. Doing the same with 2005 would have required further information about downloading and learning to use VS2005 Express.
And finally, (not withstanding the bug mentioned above), I learned from personal experience recently that it's a simple procedure to switch from a 2000 db to 2005 via the hosting control panel, but I don't know for sure that one can do the same in reverse... so, again for the sake of simplicity I advised Darrel to choose SQL2000 if present. He can easily switch to 2005 when and if needed.
I also understand that some of the newer WH4L accounts don't offer 2000 (my VPS didn') and if anyone has an account that doesn't, then they should of course use 2005. I provided the relevant connection strings for both.
And, although I've previously asked for advice on this in the forums, I've not been made aware of any vital technical reason to choose one MSSQL db over the other... so all my advice here was purely for keeping it simple.
I hope I haven't complicated it all again with that :)
Regards,
Rob