Be sure to tick the RDS option when you are setting up ColdFusion 8. I recently deselected this option for a basic ColdFusion class that I was teaching and things got ugly. First, the Java plug-in that runs in the CF administration won't work. You won't be able to path to a database file using the Java applet in the data source administrator! Dreamweaver also starts bugging out and won't setup properly. It will keep asking for an RDS password, even though RDS was not installed.

RDS is a good thing to have anyway. What is RDS? Remote Development Services, or RDS, enables applications such as Eclipse to browse available components and data structures of data sources on the ColdFusion server. You will be able to access your data sources to view your database tables and to build queries. Good stuff.