Ramifications of rebuilding the OWA

No good deed goes unpunished and no modification to a Windows OS goes smoothly. After getting OWA back and installed, I started having problems.

I noticed the problem when trying to add a new user into the domain and getting and error when creating an exchange mailbox. It was a critical error that showed up in a dialog box inside the Active Directory Users and Computers Interface.

When I looked into the Event Viewer I noticed I was getting a lot of these errors:

Event Source: MSExchangeSA
Event ID: 9097
Description:
The MAD Monitoring thread was unable to connect to WMI, error '0x80040154'.

Event Source: Userenv
Event ID: 1090
Description:
Windows couldn't log the RSoP (Resultant Set of Policies) session status. An attempt to connect to WMI failed. No more RSoP logging will be done for this application of policy.

Event Source: MSExchangeSA
Event ID: 9097
Description:
The MAD Monitoring thread was unable to connect to WMI, error '0x80040154'.

Here is the link on how to repair the WMI.

I figured I needed to backup the current system and think about doing a restore from a previous backup. I fired up NT Backup and started getting errors when trying to do shadow copies and this in the log:

Backup Status
Operation: Backup
Active backup destination: File
Media name: "Temp.bkf created 9/11/2007 at 9:50 AM"

Volume shadow copy creation: Attempt 1.
Timeout before function completed

Error returned while creating the volume shadow copy:0xffffffff.

Error returned while creating the volume shadow copy:ffffffff
Aborting Backup.

----------------------

The operation did not successfully complete.

I found this article on how to re-register the VSS dlls.

After repairing the WMI and re-registering the DLLs, I started up the backup again and got these errors:

Event Type: Error
Event Source: VSS
Event Category: None
Event ID: 20
Description:
Volume Shadow Copy Service error: A critical component required by the Volume Shadow Copy service is not registered. This might happened if an error occurred during Windows setup or during installation of a Shadow Copy provider. The error returned from CoCreateInstance on class with CLSID {faf53cc4-bd73-4e36-83f1-2b23f46e513e} and Name VSSEvent is [0x80004002].

Event Type: Error
Event Source: VSS
Event Category: None
Event ID: 8193
Description:
Volume Shadow Copy Service error: Unexpected error calling routine CoCreateInstance. hr = 0x80004002.

I tried installing SP2 and it worked this time. I got WMI errors again after rebooting so I repaired and restarted. Still getting the MAD Monitoring thread crashing.

I tried doing a backup and it worked, VSS is working again.