As someone commented the other day at a presentation I was doing, I still have VS 2005 in a VPC and not on my base machine. Why? Well I have a big ASP.NET project finishing up that is all done in 2003 (an Enterprise client, not an early adopter at all and it's been 18 months since we started) and I was just a little nervous that if I put the 2.0 Framework and the like onto my laptop that I would mess things up. I had no proof of that, and no time to go find out one way or the other, it was just a gut worry born of spending 25+ years doing this stuff. I decided to use the 2005 VPC for demos and playing with the new tools and carry on with 2003 on the actual metal.

Well today someone gave me a way cool tool that I really wanted to use -- and it needed the Framework 2.0. I decided to give it a whirl. The actual installation was nice and quick and didn't even require a reboot (though the installer did insist on my closing a few things I didn't think were framework dependent.) Then, cool tool installed, I went back to my final bug triage on the ASP.NET project, and when I brought up a report (using the ReportViewer control on the aspx page):

The report server cannot decrypt the symmetric key used to access sensitive or encrypted data in a report server database. You must either restore a backup key or delete all encrypted content and then restart the service. Check the documentation for more information.

Aaaargh! I have no clue how to restore a backup key, or what my encrypted content is and how I would feel about deleting it! So what to do? Toss that string into a search engine and you'll find links to a KB article that says "oh, you should have done xyz before you changed the user account that SRS runs under." The resolution is of no help to anyone who accidentally did so (and no, I didn't think that installing a new version of the framework would change the user account under which SRS runs.)

I uninstalled and reinstalled SRS, then redeployed my reports by opening each 2003 solution that I'm actively using on this machine, right clicking the Reports project in each and choosing Deploy. Took less than half an hour counting the near panic attack when i first got the message. But that's not a strategy for the production machine, so I just added another ToDo to the post-go-live list, since the client is sure to want the Framework 2.0 on that machine eventually.

Kate