Hello. This problem took me about 3 days to figure out. After some serious soul searching, hardcore internet research, and just mucking about I found the configuration problem that results in Dreamweaver MX erroring with "an unidentified error has occurred" when trying to establish the mysql connection through dreamweaver mx. The problem actually ended up being a misconfiguration problem on the URL prefix field (note, I *think* this value name is different in DW MX 2004) under the "Testing Server" window under the "Sites | Edit Sites" menu. I had been doing my work under localhost/stage but had localhost/ as the URL Prefix. So in effect, this Web Server- side misconfiguration resulted in the mysql/ php connection to barf when I tried to connect through Dreamweaver MX "Application | Databases| side bar window.