By Brandon W. Yuille

Whether you are constantly being annoyed by Outlook 2007's password dialog for you to enter your password or you simply cannot install SQL Server 2005, the problem is actually one in the same.

Outlook 2007 symptoms are that it simply will not save your password no matter how many times you check “Remember Password”. This problem alone almost made me uninstall Office 2007 and get my money back. Imagine you are working hard on something and a dialog box pops up to steal your input right as you are in the middle of a sentence or line of code… Yes excruciating pain indeed.

SQL Server 2005 seems to have a bigger problem, not quite as annoying though. When attempting to install, you get a message box right away alerting you to the fact that the installation has failed and there is a log of the install and what went wrong in: "%Program Files%\Microsoft SQL Server\90\Setup Bootstrap\LOG\Summary.txt". The Summary.txt file won’t tell you much, but if you move into the Files directory you will see a detailed log. Once open, the error you see looks like the following:

…
Error: Action "ParseBootstrapOptionsAction" failed during execution.  Error information reported during run:
Could not parse command line due to datastore exception.
  Source File Name: utillib\persisthelpers.cpp
Compiler Timestamp: Fri Jul 29 01:13:55 2005
     Function Name: writeEncryptedString
Source Line Number: 124
…

It turns out the answer to all this pain and suffering is by adding a simple registry key: "HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\User Shell Folders\AppData". AppData is of type REG_EXPAND_SZ and should contain the value: "%userprofile%\Application Data".

AppData was for some reason non-existent on my computer, so if you are having problems like those above please check to make sure you have this registry key. If you don’t know how to add a registry key, make a post here and I’ll update you.

Good luck!