Really Microsoft?

Today I spent an hour trying to share a folder between two machines on my local network. Yesterday I spent a half hour trying to do the same thing. In both instances, I was able to get it to work somehow, but the 'solution' is still a mystery to me, and I wasn't able to take away any consistent steps to make this work in the future. What a stupid waste of my time.

I have spent about 12 hours trying to get SQL Server Express 2008 into some sort of usable state. I tried to perform a standalone installation because I didn't want to upgrade 2005 express. Apparently that was a bad idea, and after trying to uninstall and reinstall 6 times I had about 20 orphaned installations in the magic Uninstall registry key buried somewhere deep inside the registry. After nuking all of those I was able to successfully install the app. Now I can't access the db from more then one application at a time. Want to use SSMS and then switch back to Visual Studio? Okay, please restart the SQL Server instance. Want to drop and recreate your db, restart the server first. Want to get some work done? Too bad, restart SQL Server all day instead.