Phantom URLs

An interesting “issue” popped up today. I did a fresh install of Windows 7 on my brand new HP 8530w laptop, which is a great laptop BTW. I install SQL Server 2008 followed by SP1 only to find that the Web Service URL and Report Manager URL don’t show up in the Reporting Services Configuration Manager.

The report sever would run just fine on http://localhost/reportserver and the URLs were registered correctly in the rsreportserver.config. I went as far as whipping out some WMI code and it would return the URLs as it should. But the darn URLs won’t show up. Not to mention that another user has recently reported the exact same issue to me. A bug? I started thinking of re-installing SQL Server.

Then, a Eureka moment! As with most things, there was an easy explanation. For some reason, Windows 7 has set the system font size to be 125%. Resetting it to 100% fixed the issue although it could have been a good idea to increase the label height in Reporting Services Configuration Manager to avoid such font scaling issues.