Hi,
I'm struggling trying to upgrade to Lion and the on screen instructions are to connect to App Store. When I try to do this I receive a message saying "Unable to Connect to App Store".

I have a fairly new Mac Mini, OS 10.6.8. Will some kind person please point me in the right direction.

Thanks, Mud

Not sure what "on screen instructions" you are following. Are you trying to connect through some other application or web site?

Why not just use the App Store application on your computer. It may be on your Dock (blue-ish circle with a stylized "A") or in your Applications Folder.

When it opens the top banner (at least today) was about upgrading to Lion.

First do you have an App Store account? If not then you can get one by following the prompts in App Store

If you have an App Store account are you sure you are logging on using the App Store userid and password which may be different from your Mac logon ID and password.

I noticed a time or two yesterday when I was getting flakey results on the App Store which I attributed to overloaded servers at Apple. The problems cleared up late in the afternoon and I enjoyed the fastest download of Lion I have had so far. You might try again later to see if the problem has "magically" cleared itself.

Here's an odd fact: The Mac App Store actually requires that Spotlight be enabled for one to download anything from it. If it isn't, the App Store just beachballs endlessly until it has to be force quit.

I had disabled Spotlight back in the Tiger days using the great Spotless utility because I was having issues with Spotlight running for hours on end every night, interfering with backups and slowing my computer down.

Luckily after re-enabling Spotlight (under Snow Leopard), all is well now and Spotlight behaves as it should.

I found this answer by Googling around a bit, but it wasn't easy to find.

Hope this helps someone else.

Interesting... I suppose the App Store uses Spotlight to locate the old versions of apps that it deletes before it d/l's new ones?