To add more info to this;
I am also using Everest and have the same when running in a virtual enviroment
(Recently ditched VMware for Hyper-V as when things go wrong I can still access everything, my lack of knowledge at fault here, but will play with VMWare again when I get some time - I am the Finance Manager and the internal IT department) but my physical server is running fine.
I seem to recall that my VMware version worked fine though...I will get a spare box and try to fire it up again later.
nothing in the log files says there is a problem.
I have installed on (virtualised) Win 2003 R2 Enterprise SP2 with SQL Server 2005 enterprise and on a Win 2008 R2 x64 SP1with SQL Server 2005 enterprise
tstahlfsu2, did you get any further with this?
Stu