Chris D. sends us this tip regarding the effect of firewalls on the connection. We have not tested this yet - but thought we would pass on the advice. Thanks Chris!
After trying everything listed on this page, with no luck and spending a day searching newsgroups, I finally, nailed the problem down to a hardware firewall at the ISP.
If your server is hosted with an ISP, as mine was, doing the above may not be enough, depending on how the server itself is setup.
Resolution
Go to command prompt and type netstat -a
Within the results you need to see if the box is listening on the ports you think.
In my case, the hardware firewall was preventing me from being able to connect.
The solution was to stop using dynamics ports and open up a static port.
To do this open up the SQL configuration manager.
Click on protocols.
Double Click on TCP/IP
Click on IP Addresses tab
As mentioned in the above document, 0 means dynamic ports.
I found that by setting the static port, this solved my problem.
Put an empty string in the TCP Dynamic ports box
Set the port you want to connect on in the TCP port box.
Do this for the net connections you have.
Connect to the SQL using:
IPADDRESS,PORT
Works great now.
Obviously, you should check out that doing do will not open you up to security risks with your ISP, however, this was the solution that ended an 8 hour hairpulling session and I thought I would pass it on, just in case I could one day help someone else.
