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Susan Bradley AKA the SBS diva is a SBS 2003 Legend!

Following normal Microsoft practice of patching what aint broke and then wondering why it is broke, I installed the Best Practices Analyser last week on my SBS2003 server. Previously it had been running absolutely perfectly. (well as perfectly as a Microsoft server can get - only needed restarting every 2 weeks or so)

The BPA told me my system was largely ok but I should fix some things. With the assistance of Susan I duly fixed these things.

I then took the leap and installed WSS3 in a side by side configuration with WSS2 as upgrading WSS2 breaks it on a SBS2003 box (Can't wait for Cougar to come out!). There were some issues with that including one that can't be solved at this point which is related to using a Vista client and IE to hit the site. So much for integration!

However a bunch more stuff has been "broken' in the process.

Yesterday I spent a deal of time troubleshooting why my internet connection reported a massive spike in traffic, 5gb over what I expected. This I eventually tracked down to WSUS downloading stuff I hadn't asked for, and Susan has blogged this morning the reasons why WSUS downloads extra language packs.

Following that I checked in with Susan to see if she knew why my Monitoring and Reporting was giving me 404 errors and no reports. Loopback she proclaimed and sent me to her site to check the Monitoring and Reporting Snap In problems. This solution solved my problem.

Now I could see my reports I could see I had a problem with VSS, Volume Shadow Copy Service. I was getting error id 8194. Before I could fix this I needed to find out what it was, and now the error the BPA had returned saying my Help and Support Service had stopped made sense. Between Susan and Davids reporting of this I was able to find and use the obscure command line workaround to restart the Help and Support Service. Now I had that working I could try and track down the Error ID 8194. - haha - there is no topic for that error!

Google helped me find Tomas description of the problem (same as mine) and Robert from Microsofts answer which didn't help me at all. Susan came to the rescue with this post pointing to edwalts post containing the solution.

Heres what I did in a command prompt

In most cases, re-registering the VSS binaries resolves the issue.
To re-register VSS binaries and services, first stop the Volume Shadow Copy Service:

1. Open a command prompt and change to \windows\system32
2. net stop vss

Then register the following dlls and services (be sure you're still in the
windows\system32 directory at your command prompt):

regsvr32 ole32.dll
regsvr32 vss_ps.dll
vssvc /Register
regsvr32 /i swprv.dll
regsvr32 /i eventcls.dll
regsvr32 es.dll
regsvr32 stdprov.dll
regsvr32 vssui.dll
regsvr32 msxml.dll
regsvr32 msxml3.dll
regsvr32 msxml4.dll

Then restart vss by typing net start vss in the command prompt

One final thing to resolve now and that is the WSUS self update service is not working Error ID 13042. There is a good help and support topic for this but I couldn't undertand most of it. will look at it later.

I love having Susan on my IM list and hope she doesn't get pissed off with all my questions! Thanks so much Susan.