I know, I know, no flurry of posts advising switch to LAMP. I'm stuck with WIMP (Windows, IIS, . . .) at least for now. When using an db administrative account other than 'root', for connecting to MySQL running under Windows Server Platform, update consistently fails due to insufficient account privileges, specifically, "ALTER" privileges. I have gone into MySQL and changed the db administrator user privileges to have everything, then rebooted the machine, but that doesn't work either. Workaround is to change $wgDBadminuser to 'root', run the updates, then change back. I have never been comfortable with leaving the password ($wgDBadminpassword) to 'root' in a text file even if only temporarily, and doing this for 20 or so wikis is cumbersome, so I'm not highly enamored of this solution. Before I document this workaround on mediawiki, am I doing something stupid and obvious (and if so, advice on solution is solicited) or is this just another one of the funky little reasons to switch to LAMP? Jack D. Pond CIO, Montgomery County, PA "Before I got married I had six theories about bringing up children; now I have six children and no theories." -- John Wilmot,(1647-1680)