I had a very annoying issue with Windows Live Writer integration with Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 with CKS:EBE 2.0.

If you add a new Blog to Live Writer and just use the host address of your WSS 3.0 site it didn’t work for me and I was getting “Access Denied” errors in Live Writer.

Thanks to Ivan Sanders (@iasanders and http://dimension-si.com/blog/default.aspx) he recommended that I add the Blog in Live Writer as http://wss.made4the.net/metaweblog.ashx instead of http://wss.made4the.net/ and this WORKED!

I was digging into the depths of the Event Viewer and finding nothing, nothing in ULS logs, but getting the below error in IIS logs for Web Application:

2010-06-28 10:40:54 62.233.101.254 POST /_layouts/metaweblog.aspx - 80 - 124.148.206.69 Mozilla/4.0+(compatible;+MSIE+8.0;+Windows+NT+6.1;+Windows+Live+Writer+1.0) 401 5 0 1145

So thanks again to Ivan for helping me solve this on MSDN forums!

There is one glitch to this approach though…when Live Writer publishes it does pop up a browser window to that .ashx file rather than the homepage…but I can deal with that for Rich Text submission of blog posts ;-)