Silicon Dreams

On the topic of Sql Server 2005 installations, A seperate issue that may occur is the following error message:

SQL Server Setup failed to obtain system account information for the ASPNET account. To proceed, reinstall the .NET Framework, and then run SQL Server Setup again.

This is generally caused by installing IIS and not configuring asp .net, particularly if you install IIS after already having installed Visual Studio at an earlier date.

Fix this by registering asp .net with IIS. To do this open a command prompt and go to the following directory:
C:\windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.60727\

This is assuming you’re using .Net 2.0 or higher (3.0, 3.5). Even if you’re using the 3.x series and Visual Studio 2008, you still need to go to the v2.0 directory for this operation – this is because the 3.x series are not a replacement for the 2.x series, but rather extensions. (3.x is a superset of 2.x and there have been no breaking changes to 2.x functionality).

If you want to understand this further, there is an interesting post about it here: http://blogs.msdn.com/vijaysk/archive/2008/03/20/running-asp-net-3-5-on-iis.aspx

For now though, run the following command: aspnet_regiis.exe -i

This will register asp.net with iis and hopefully solve this issue.