I would check and make sure that Windows Firewall is turned off. That could be the culprit.

LOL, I don't know why you have Windows 7 on the brain. Just so we're clear. I have a Dell Poweredge 1800 that I bought in 2003. It has Windows 2003 Server SP2 on it (the full version) including MS SQL Server 2000 SP4 with all the current updates.

I have been using this machine for nearly 8 years and even though I'm self taught on it, I have a pretty good handle on how it operates. I do serve a multitude of websites using it from the closet in my office, lol

And yes, It is NOT DMZ'd, the Firewall is OFF, the exceptions are correct and the ports have been opened. I use a Netgear ProSafe VPN firewall and have an active directory setup on the server with 8 other machines attached to it (and yes, some of them ARE Windows 7,lol).

But then, what do I know.... I steal cars for a living....

Just saying, in my experience, a lot of these kinds of problems come from Microsoft's "you're too dumb to keep your own machine secure" mentality.

Ya, I'll be your friend here. I have windows 7 on a few machines. What a clusterphock the security setup is. The only people that can figure out how to do security related things on that OS are the hackers themselves.

I'm actually glad to hear you're running on an earlier version because I have more hope of being able to fix that without having to figure out how to convince ms I'm not out to destroy your system.

I was able to reproduce some strange behavior by installing over a service that hadn't been uninstalled. So that's something I can follow up on. However, though I could create a situation where I couldn't stop the service or uninstall it, I always managed to get it working again just by trying different sequences of install/uninstall/stop/start, until it worked.

I created shortcuts for the 4 actions and set them to admin access. I'm going to put a menu on TWGSServe if you run it without a parameter so you can choose which to do, then I'll provide a shortcut to it. You'll just need to set that shortcut to admin privileges and that should simplify managing the service.

I'll follow up when I know more.