Three days ago my machine hung. I still don't know why. I had been away for a while, came back, moved the mouse... hang! Oh bummer. So, my only choice was to hard boot it. I really hate to do this, especially when I have an active development environment open and a Parallels session running. Nonetheless, it was my only option.

When I started Parallels after the reboot Windows dropped into disk check mode to make sure all systems were go; they were not. The Windows disk scan started spitting out all kinds of corrupted, orphaned, lost filenames, but after a while it said it had everything repaired and booted into the Windows desktop. After poking around a little everything appeared to be OK. Nothing lost. Nice. However, when I opened Visual Studio and tried to login to the Web Application I was working on, the login failed.

Argh! I was *just* working on this application yesterday without problems. <sigh> Something obviously went wrong on that hard reset. It took a whole day to figure out, but I finally realized that my SQL Server setup wasn't working properly. When I opened SQL Enterprise Manager, right clicked a table and selected "Display All" or "Display Top..." it would chug for a bit then pop up an error message that simply read "Unknown Error." Nice. I'd like to give a gold star to the guy that wrote that error dialog.

I tried everything I could think of to get SQL Server to work again. even replaced my virtual C drive with a back up virtual C drive from several months ago. When I did that it worked, but the back up drive was too old to utilize, so I had to revert back to the drive that was giving me troubles. However, with this new knowledge that the DB was not corrupt and SQL Server would work under the right conditions I pressed on. I twiddled the registry. I uninstalled and reinstalled SQL Server 2000 (twice). Still, nothing worked. Same error.

After much poking around on the Internet I finally came across this post. Down near the bottom Fotis Tsitsirigos writes "I had the same problem. The solution was to run the Norton Win Doctor. It found some kind of error in the registry, regarding the "msadce.dll" and fixed. Since then, everything works fine." Ah hah! So, I searched around a bit for how to "fix msadce.dll", but again, no success. Finally, I took Fotis' advice, went to Symantec and bought System Works, which includes WinDoctor.

Once I got everything installed, ran WinDoctor and let it fix the problems it ran across... Walla! SQL Server Manager is working again! Praise the Lord and Thank you Fotis Tsitsirigos!

Can't say this will work for everyone who gets the "Unkown Error" dialog, but it worked for Fotis and me!

Have a blessed day.