Thanks MJ - I saw that, it is a strange place to look. Anyhow, I did not have that entry in my environment variables on either server. We actually...

Thanks - I did try both, with a user logged and not-logged on the passive node, as I believe I had seen that during the SP2 upgrade. The account...

Applying SP3 to SQL 2005 SP2, 2 node Active/Active cluster, 6 named instances

First, I would read about the major changes between the two versions. There are some significant differences, such as SSIS versus DTS, depending on your environment.

Then, download and...

Nope, like I mentioned, the account is a local admin and with SA privileges (full control) and I can start/stop services with that account just fine.

My bad! I meant to say detach databases, not jobs.

Everyone, problem resolved and it was due to a conflicting IP address in one of the nodes registry with the actual ip of the cluster (of that instance).  I guess a few main things...

An interesting twist - the ports mentioned above belong to instances, (3 instnaces on the same server).  The General Tab of Client Network utility on the server, TCP port is the...

Problem solved, that is right, it had nothing to do with cluster.  Apparently one of our newbe DBAs just learned how to change tcp/ip ports and had randomly changed them!!

Point taken and the issue is resolved (it was getting stock on Full Text Search resource), since the DBA were not using that functionality, we removed it and everything worked.

By...

That makes sense! what doesn't make sense to me is that our DBAs asking for this - and here is why, see if you agree:

We have 3 instances on...

That seems to be the case, one-time installation appears to have taken care of both nodes. 

While on the subject, anyone knows of a good documentation that shows how the...

That's what I thought, but when I went to install on the second node, the installation asked me what to do with the existing one and if I wanted to...

Do I need to have a sperate drive associated with each instance, or can all instances be on the same drive, same IP? (I have different drives associated with Log,...

I guess I am responding to myself. I just realized that despite what I had seen in several articles, the correct dll to map to that XP is actually...