Hi,

I have a SharePoint setup and was messing with some things late last week, got it working, and took a snapshot. All was well. I tried to make additional changes and it seemed like my environment was hosed. So, I restored my last snapshot. However, that didn't fix things. I'm seeing the same problems. That made me think something else is going on.

Trying to do anything in Application Mgt in Central Admin would bring you this error:

A network-related or instance-specific error occurred while establishing a connection to SQL Server. The server was not found or was not accessible. Verify that the instance name is correct and that SQL Server is configured to allow remote connections. (provider: SQL Network Interfaces, error: 26 - Error Locating Server/Instance Specified)

In Central Admin in SharePoint (SP), in Application Management, if I click on any link in there, I would get the error about not being able to locate the SQL server. Only in Central Admin. I have other sites in SP that access my SQL server and those appear to be working.

In case this helps anyone, I'm happy to report I figured it out.  I've been working on setting up forms-based authentication with SharePoint. One tiny little portion of an entry in the Central Admin web.config file is what caused all of this. Well, not the SQL sluggishness. That's still a mystery to me. 

Once I changed...

<roleManager enabled="true">

to

<roleManager>

dropping the enabled="true" part ...it all started working again.