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I'm working on a client project right now and I ran across something that caused me a bit of grief. I imported the database into SQL Express 2005. After the import I was able to view the db, its tables, and its data.

A couple days later when I came back to work on it some more, I was no longer able to view the database contents. Any time I tried to give myself permissions to the database, I kept getting a cryptic error about updating tables.

An exception occurred while executing a Transact-SQL statement or batch.
(Microsoft.SqlServer.Express.ConnectionInfo)
-> User does not have permission to perform this action. (Microsoft SQL Server, Error: 15247)

Turned out that when I imported the database the first time I had run SQL Server Manager as an administrator (I'm running on Windows 7). When I came back to continue my work, I was not running as an administrator. This also explained why I couldn't modify the permissions for my user.

I restarted the SQL Server Manager as an administrator, gave myself permissions under the Security > Logins section. I double clicked my used account in the list and under Server Roles, checked the sysadmin role. I then restarted SQL Server manager as my normal user, and voila, I had access.

I suppose this is old news to SQL Server experts, but it took me a few minutes to figure it out.