I have been trying to move from an old Vista laptop which has run R6 for some 9 years to a clean new W10 machine.

Following Mike's excellent instructions on the consortium site, I succeeded in installing .net3.5, and SQL Server 2014 and R6.

R6 (6.23.2.279) opened correctly, and I was able to update the dictionary to 3B and rebuild the indexes yesterday.

Today I was about to restore the database from the backup, but could not run R6 at all.

On trying to open R6, even as Administrator, and after a restart, this error appears, and when I click OK the R6 initial screen closes.

An error occurred whilst starting the application.
EOleException: [DBNETLIB][ConnectionOpen (Connect().]SQL Server does not exist or access denied

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On opening Management Studio, the following error appears:

Cannot connect to LAPTOP-GK0DIGLL\SQLEXPRESS.
Additional information:
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) (Microsoft SQL Server)

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I had installed ExpressionWeb since yesterday, but even after uninstalling and restarting the problem persists.

I also (as a different problem, I would think) have an alert from AVG for the Luhe Fiha malware in the R6 Uninstall.exe program.  I suspect this is a false positive, and not something that would stop R6 opening, but confirmation would be welcome.

Murdo