Following up on my previous post, I tried working with an application framework on my XP SP2 system and when I ran the NUnit tests, all transactional Commands were Red with: "The partner transaction manager has disabled its support for remote/network transactions."

The first thing I found was that Windows 2003 is in fact more secure in deployment, and thus required some loosening.

Then I discovered that this was also an area where SP2 had in fact made things more secure, and also require some loosening.

While this was a bit painful to slug through, it's still good to find these things on the developer desktop rather than on first deployment to staging or worse to production...  It's another very useful benefit to running with Virtualized systems as it allows the simulation of the real environment so that things that shouldn't work (like local system access accounts and short-circuited security) break were they are broken ;)  

One thing to consider with this is it is yet another reason to start moving app servers and web servers out of the DMZ and into the corporate and network and leverage the ability of ISA 2004 to run in the DMZ exclusively.  Topic for another day. 

Now if I could just convince myself to take my user account of the Administrators group...