You can avoid this in a simple way:

1. Rename the .img file into an .iso file.

2. Download 7-zip portable version and extract the executable to a folder on your server desktop.

3. Navigate to the extracted folder and run 7-ZipPortable.exe.

4. Browse and open (double-click) the renamed .iso file

5. You can extract all files from the .iso to another folder on your desktop

Now you can browse to that folder and run the setup of language pack with no problem.

On the Server in SharePoint 3.0 Central Administration select Operations tab and select Alternate Access Mappings under Global Configuration.
 

 
Now change the web application you want to edit public URLs for by using the dropdown on the right hand of the page
 

Next click Edit Public URLs
 

And now enter full URLs (including http:// or https://. You can add up to 5 URLs to which the web application will respond

At the end also add the host headers to the Website in the Internet Information Services manager.

Note that this works on the web application level. If you have site collections with custom URLs you can’t configure multiple URLs for each of these (or if someone know the way, I’d appreciate if you left me a comment).

Next click the button “New Parameter” and enter a name for it. Then in a Parameter Source dropdown, select Query String.

Under the dropdown enter the variable name – which parameter in URL to read. For example if it will be reading parameter “p” in url webborg.blogspot.com?p=1234 just enter letter p. You can also set a default value if there is no p parameter in the URL.Next click OK.

And that’s it. Now you can use this parameter for filtering, or in the Data View Web part as you desire. If you want to use the parameter in the DataView just enter its name with a $ (dollar) sign before it. SharePoint Designer’s Intellisense will recognize it.

After a couple of retries (also uninstalling SSEE and a lot of reading on the web to my horror I’ve found one sentence “you’ll need a clean install of Windows Server 2003.”

.

This was a bit tough because of existing users and some other parameters. After digging a bit deeper and combining knowlege of couple of experts’ blogs I’ve managed to successfully reinstall WSS3 without Windows Internal Database (SSEE) and into SQL server 2005.

Before I write how I did it, let me clear that this solution worked for me. I’m presuming that you don’t have anything else installed in SSEE and I’m not responsible for any errors that might happen if you’re following the same procedure. So please before making anything on a production server – backup, backup, backup. This procedure includes messing with Windows registry!

Here goes:

1. Copy all the SharePoint Sites to another temporary folder
Using
 
stsadm -o backup -url http://<site_collection_url> -filename <location and filename>
 
copying backup files to new server and
 
stsadm -o restore -url http://<site_collection_url> -filename <location and filename>
 
on the temporary server worked the best. It kept all the relations and all the custom formatting on all the sites.

2. If these are productions sites modify DNS or forwarding to point to the temporary server

3. Here’s where the “fun” begins: Delete all the SharePoint Web applications

4. Uninstall Windows SharePoint Services through Control Panel

5. Uninstall Windows internal database (##SSEE)
Connex’ Copper Coins has it described in his blog here. Just in case I’m writing a short ressume:

Under HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESOFTWAREMicrosoftWindowsCurrentVersionUninstall click different GUIDs untill in the right pane you see under “Display name” Microsoft SQL 2005 Embedded Edition”. Under that registry copy the value under “UninstallString“. Run the command prompt window, paste the command AND add “CALLERID=OCSETUP” at the end of commend line. For example: MsiExec.exe /X{BDD79957-5801-4A2D-B09E-852E7FA64D01} CALLERID=OCSETUP.EXE.

(ressumed from Connex’ Copper Coins)

6- Delete all files and folders under %windir%SYSMSISSEE

7. delete all and folders files under %Programfiles%Common FilesMicrosoft Sharedweb server extensions12

8. Using reged backup and delete in registry everything under HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESOFTWAREMicrosoftShared ToolsWeb Server Extensions12.0

9. The previous step also deleted the “Server language” entry. so Using notepad create a .reg file with the following text:

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESOFTWAREMicrosoftShared ToolsWeb Server Extensions12.0ServerLanguage]
“1033″=”"

and run it to restore the “Server Language” entry needed for Windows SharePoint Services installation.

With that I have removed every trace (or at least enough) of Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 from the server. Now I was able to re-run the WSS 3 setup and and it offered me the option for nstalling it into SQL server 2005 and without SSEE.

This is how you can have it done without making a clean install of Windows Server 2003.

If you need help installing WSS, I recommend the following article on technet:

http://technet2.microsoft.com/windowsserver/WSS/en/library/6181fe5b-90ca-40cf-aade-abd59cf3c9071033.mspx?mfr=true

The reason for this is that SharePoint lost the connection to the database.

Reasons may be the following:

• SQL or WMSDE database may not be running

• IIS may be running in IIS 5.0 isolation mode
• The account for connecting to SQL or WMSDE might be gone or with changed password
• update – SQL Server Embedded Edition might not be running (check services) – Thanks, deanoc (see the comments)

The solution to these is on the following link:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/823287/en-us

But I’ve found another reason that could be. Simple: The SQL is running, credentials are also ok and IIS isn’t in the 5.0 isolation mode. The problem may occur if sharepoint simply can’t find the database. Reasons for this may be many: the database has moved, dns has changed, … In my case was the later. By changing the DNS server in the network we’ve had to add one more record manually to point to the correct one and the sites started to work.

This is super, because if you have your whole site built in Flash you can still make HTML substitute for the ones without the player.

Thanks to Deconcept’s SWF Object script file…

Simple to integrate and simply works