Installing GP 10 on Windows Server 2008 (and Vista)

Today, for the first time, I finally had to install GP 10 on Windows Server 2008. The server also has SQL Server 2008, which I'm embarrassed to say I just installed for the first time this week.

The server installed fine, and SQL 2008 installed fine, and GP appeared to install fine. But when I launched GP Utilities, I got this error:

"An error occurred while using the BCP utility--data was not correctly copied to the server."

At first I thought it might be that I didn't install BCP during the SQL 2008 installation. Having never installed SQL 2008 before, and seeing that there was a SQL 2008 feature pack with a separate release of SQL 2008 Command Line utilities, I thought that maybe BCP is no longer distributed in the standard SQL 2008 release.

Of course installing the command line utilities didn't help, so I checked the PartnerSource Knowledge Base, which offered nothing useful.

I then fell back to my good buddy Google, which pointed me straight to Mohammad Daoud's blog entry with the solution to the issue (Run GP Utilities as Administrator).

It's apparently the same issue that occurs on Vista with GP, but as I have avoided Vista like the plague, I've been lucky enough to never experience that issue.

Thanks fellow GP bloggers!

Update: After reading more blog posts, apparently installing GP outside of the Program Files directory on Vista and Windows 2008 will allow you to avoid the UAC issue entirely.