I had a tough time trying to have SharePoint working perfectly on a Windows 7 development machine that was occasionally disconnected from the Active Directory (when I am home I must connect through a VPN). I mostly had problems with service applications such as User Profile, Managed Metadata, Business Connectivity Services and the like, and all I knew were cryptical messages such as “access denied” or “the service or application pool is not started”. I was sure that both the services and application pools were running under a domain account that had proper permissions on the SQL Server instance, and basically it was a fresh installation. Lots of people are having the same problem, apparently. After banging my head against the wall for several days, I remembered about farm (what I had) versus stand-alone (which I had never tried) installations. Bingo!

Here’s what I did: I dropped all SharePoint databases and logins and reinstalled SP from scratch, only this time not in farm mode, but as stand-alone. After the SharePoint Configuration Wizard started, I cancelled it and started the Management Shell. I created the configuration database manually by using the New-SPConfigurationDatabase cmdlet where I specified a local account – something that the Configuration Wizard wouldn’t allow me to do. Then I restarted the Configuration Wizard and everything began working perfectly! Yes, I got some pre-configured service applications and also some content which I didn’t need, but I realized it was possible to drop and recreate everything the way I wanted to. All services and application pools are now running under local accounts, which is fine for my development needs. Really, Microsoft…

I hope this will bring light to someone facing the same problems!