I was a bit of a selfish bunny at the London Girl Geek Dinner last week, and cornered Eileen Brown to see if she had a SQL minion that could help me try to get the client tools installed again; unfortunately the SQL Evangelist position is still open, but after refilling her wine glass and joking she owed me a support call for being her booze monkey she reached into her handbag and produced a quick assist card.

If you've ever found yourself at a party and someone says "Can you fix my computer?", well Microsoft have the answer for their employees, free support calls you can give out. I've never placed a "proper" support call with Microsoft before. It was all rather slick, I ended up bounced to somewhere in India, where, for the next 4 days, the support analyst worked to figure out what was causing the problem. This included monitoring my desktop via Remote Assist, and accepting files via a support upload web site (which was amusing referred to as an FTP site) and lots of phone calls. It did feel a bit like the analyst was grasping at straws at times ("Can you uninstall .net framework 2.0?" "Errr no, not unless you want me to uninstall Visual Studio too"), but after culling the registry in various places finally SQL Developer Edition, and the client tools installed. Woohoo, I can do some work on subtext again!