I was trying to be too cleaver with my WSSDemo.com server configuration. The combination of Virtual Servers, Farms, virtual IIS sites and lots of changes to the alternate access mappings caused a serious problem with authentication.

Last Friday I could not post PPT slides which was the final straw so I tested backing up my site collection and restoring it to another VPC image running on another machine and it all worked.

This morning I reinstalled SharePoint on the WSSDemo.com and restored the site. This seems to have fixed all but two problems (the top menu bar highlights the Blog tab when you are on the home site and the mobile default page).

The main issue I found during the restore was that the default content database created when I created the new web application was only 10 Mb which wasn’t big enough for the restore. I normally create my  content databases manually so that they will support the anticipated site collection size. If you go with the default SQL settings you will always have a slow server as the db is regularly extended (don’t know if this is less of an overhead in SQL 2005 but it was with 2000).

Now I can focus on that content migration...