I've been handed a legacy .Net Windows application that was previously used on Windows XP, and asked to debug a few problems encountered on Windows 7 clients. The original developers are all gone. I'm down to only a single error -- a seemingly common one:
"A network related or instance-specific error occurred while establishing
a connection to SQL Server. The server was not found or was not
accessible. Verify that the instance name is correct and that SQL Server
is configured to allow remote connections. (provider: Named Pipes
Provider, error: 40 - Could not open a connection to SQL Server)"
Curiously, this error only occurs for ordinary users. When the application is started using "Run as Administrator" it connects to the database immediately. We believe we can configure the app to always start as an administrator, but obviously we'd like to run it without that if we can. However, I haven't seen any good suggestions why the database connection would only fail this one way.
Any ideas? I've seen at least one troubleshooting guide that suggested trying with Run as Administrator, but it didn't say how to proceed if that fixes it. Am I just supposed to stop at this point? If I was having a UI problem I might understand that some old apps just aren't going to work in Windows 7, but this is just connecting to the database. Seems like we should be able to do this. I just don't know what to check.
Thanks in advance.