BizTalk Enterprise Single Sign-on service starting, starting, starting...
I do development work on a laptop; sometimes I'm connected to the network, sometimes I'm not. I installed BizTalk 2004 on my little laptop and quickly discovered an irritation with the Enterprise Single Sign-on service while working offline: after boot-up it remains 'starting...' but never actually starts.
After much rummaging around I discovered that the service was waiting for the BizTalk SQL Server Agent jobs to run. Why weren't they running? Because BizTalk config had helpfully set them up with my Windows username - which doesn't resolve when I'm working offline.
I created a SQL login with dbo permissions to the messagebox database and changed the Agent jobs to run under that instead. SQL Agent is happy, so Enterprise Single Sign-on is happy.
Figuring this out took my entire commute-to-work time this morning. I just want you all to know that.