The request failed or the service did not respond in a timely fashion?

Question

I have the following error while I connect to SQL Server 2008 Management Studio with Windows authentication.

\"The request failed or the service did not resp         


        

Answer 1

After chasing this issue for some hours, we found an log in the SQL Server Agent logs stating the following:

This installation of SQL Server Agent is disabled. The edition of SQL server that installed this service does not support SQL server agent.

We were using SQL Server Express. After some Googling it appears SQL Server Express does not support SQL Server Agent.

I didn't find a direct piece of Microsoft communications stating that SQL Express doesn't support SQL Server Agent, however this sentiment seems to be echoed across many forums.