PHP Can't Connect to MS SQL Express 2008 – Plesk

I’m struggling to connect to my MS SQL Express 2008 edition from my PHP files, but it seems virtually impossible.

I’ve found several guides/notes on teh intarweb solving the issues, but none of these have helped me any further.

I’ve taken a script from another site and entered my database information, but I still get errors:

<?php
$myServer = "localhost";
$myUser = "demo_basic";
$myPass = "1234";
$myDB = "demo_basic"; 

//connection to the database
$dbhandle = mssql_connect($myServer, $myUser, $myPass)
  or die("Couldn't connect to SQL Server on $myServer"); 

//select a database to work with
$selected = mssql_select_db($myDB, $dbhandle)
  or die("Couldn't open database $myDB"); 

//declare the SQL statement that will query the database
$query = "SELECT nitid, nisname ";
$query .= "FROM navitems";

//execute the SQL query and return records
$result = mssql_query($query);

$numRows = mssql_num_rows($result); 
echo "<h1>" . $numRows . " Row" . ($numRows == 1 ? "" : "s") . " Returned </h1>"; 

//display the results 
while($row = mssql_fetch_array($result))
{
  echo "<li>" . $row["nitid"] . $row["nisname"] . "</li>";
}
//close the connection
mssql_close($dbhandle);
?>

I get this error:

Warning: mssql_connect()
[function.mssql-connect]: Unable to
connect to server: localhost in
C:inetpubvhostsdexterholding.dkhttpdocs_ripsql.php
on line 8 Couldn’t connect to SQL
Server on localhost

You can see for yourself at: http://www.dehold.net/_rip/sql.php

Any ideas?
I’m running Windows Server 2008 with PLESK and PHP5 as FastCGI.