Hi Dave

I've had a look into this for Eleanor. Assuming you are on a network version of Recorder, the solution we found was to look up the IP Address of the machine that your SQL Server database is on and use that instead of the machine name in the registry settings for Recorder. When connecting to a SQL Server instance, you can either specify a machine name (the most common way) or an IP address and it seems that in yours and Eleanor's case it doesn't work very well using the machine name. Note though that Eleanor is just trialling this solution out so there is a possibility it doesn't work - but if not it should not damage anything so you can always reset things as they are now.
Here are some steps to help you fix it, First, you need to know the name of the machine that your SQL Server is running on, or better still the IP address. If you don't know this, you can look in the registry. If you are confident of doing this yourself, you can do it by going to Start -> Run -> type in regedit and click OK, then browse to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Dorset Software\Recorder 6 and checking the value for Server Name. If you aren't used to the registry editor application I'd recommend finding someone to help as it is possible to break things badly if you change the wrong settings!

Your Server Name value can either be just a machine name, or if it has a slash in it, then it will be the machine name\instance name. The bit you are interested in is the machine name.

Now you have the machine name, go back to Start -> Run, then this time type in cmd and press OK. You will see a command prompt. Type in the word ping followed by a space then the machine name and press return. This will hopefully show something like "Reply from 1.2.3.4" where the 4 numbers including the dots between them are the IP address of your server. If so, take a note of these and close the command prompt.

Now, in the registry editor double click on the Server Name entry so you get a popup dialog allowing you to change the value, and replace the machine name part of the entry with the IP address you have just found. Don't change anything from the slash onwards if there is one. Save the entry then try to start Recorder. With any luck it will let you log in OK now.

Let us know how you get on,

Best Wishes