Martin71

I might add that I have tried this with various WP version including 3.

I disabled it, but unfortunately it still doesn’t work.

Thanks for the suggestion but it doesn’t work either. Same error message.

Any other suggestion? Might it be linked to Windows 7 and some obscure port or firewall issue?

As I said in my initial post above, my local copy of wp-config.php is an exact copy of the one on my distant site, which works fine. Therefore all information is necessarily correct: mysql host, username and password.

Hi Pranav,

Thanks for your answer.
I confirmed with my web host that remote access is allowed and it should work.
Regarding the current mysql user rights, well, accessing the database is working fine from my distant site, so I guess this proves there should not be any issue on that side. (Unless I am missing something of course.)

Any other suggestion?

Thanks.