In the December and February/March CTPs, many users have reported that trying to launch Profiler only yielded an entry in Task Manager for PROFILER90.EXE — no GUI showed up, and no work seemed to be done. The entry only showed 2,572 KB of RAM being utilized, so obviously this was a big difference from prior builds, such as the October CTP (which launched successfully, and used over 25 MB of RAM before starting a trace).

I tried this at a command line, to see if I could determine whether certain arguments might be required to launch it with a GUI:

E:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\90\Tools\Binn\Profiler90.exe -?

However, this only resulted in another instance of PROFILER90.EXE in Task Manager.

As it turns out, this is a Windows Server 2003 security issue, caused because Profiler is a digitally signed application. It can be resolved by:

• running profiler on Windows XP;
• using the old profiler from an existing SQL Server 2000 environment;
• installing Windows Server 2003 Service Pack 1 Release Candidate;
• obtaining the hotfix from KB #839146; or,
• waiting for Windows Server 2003 Service Pack 1.