I'm trying to figure out how to install MSDE 2000 for both 2003 office products and visual studio.net 2003. I seen if your using MSDE for visual studio to add instancename=vsdotnet when setting up. I did that and when I went to open the Northwind sample database I got a message telling me that SQL desktop engine was not found, but the server was running. any help would be much appreciated.