Recently, I have just setup my new company laptop to run Windows 2008 as a desktop and reinstalling SharePoint in Hyper-V.  Upon completion of the installation and while accessing the Shared Services Provider, I was prompted continuously with authentication prompt, even I have entered the correct user and password.  Subsequently, I am just presented with a blank page.

There is a KB article at http://support.microsoft.com/kb/896861 that describes the same scenario.

This is more of a note to myself to remember to set the DisableLoopbackCheck in the registry:

Steps:

1. Open your registry editor by going to Start –> Run and enter regedit and click OK.
2. Go to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Lsa in the registry editor.
3. Right-click Lsa, click on New and select DWORD value.
4. Enter DisableLoopbackCheck and press Enter.
5. Right-click DisableloopbackCheck and select Modify.
6. In the Value data box, enter 1 and click OK.
7. Restart your server.

I would recommend that you do this on at least the Central Administration server, if not all WFE servers.

When you install the Visual Studio Extensions for WSS, you are prompted to select a web site or create a new web site, and select an application pool to be used for the new site.  This site will be used for deploying your SharePoint artifacts into SharePoint.

However, if you are doing this on a Windows 2008 server, which is running IIS 7, there is an additional features that will need to be activated.  Otherwise, you will an encounter the following error:

Go to your Features in the Server Manager, click on “Add Features”

Expand the .NET 3.0 Framework  Features and under the “WCF Activation”, select the “HTTP Activation” and click “Next” to install the feature.

So if you are trying to install the 10 SharePoint free themes, you will need to enable the WCF Activation in order to deploy them.

Cheers