Steve Jobs 1955 - 2011

Like him or not, Steve Jobs was one of the greatest innovators of our time. His creative vision saved Apple from the brink in the late nineties and turned it into a consumer electronics powerhouse. Just look at how the iPod, iPad and the iPhone has changed our lives. With his health failing he passed the torch one final time to now CEO and Chairman of the board Tim Cook this past August. It will be interesting to see how Apple fairs in the coming years without the innovation and creativity of Jobs. He touched a lot of people and his loss will be felt throughout the world.

"The world rarely sees someone who has had the profound impact Steve has had, the effects of which will be felt for many generations to come. For those of us lucky enough to get to work with him, it’s been an insanely great honor. I will miss Steve immensely."

- Bill Gates

An error occurred when loading the task sequence

Recently I ran into a problem where I was unable to open and edit any of my task sequences. It didn’t matter whether I was accessing ConfigMgr from a remote console or locally on one of my site servers – they would fail to open. The error that I was getting:

"An error occurred when loading the task sequence"
I tried rebooting the problem site server but still no luck. According to KB2468097 this is caused because the BDD_* WMI classes are no longer correctly registered under the \root\SMS\site_ namespace in WMI.

• Close all of your remote and local SCCM admin console sessions
• Log on to your Configuration Manager server and select Start -> All Programs -> Microsoft Deployment Toolkit -> Configure ConfigMgr Integration
• In the Configure ConfigMgr Integration wizard, select “Remove the ConfigMgr custom action definitions” and then click next to remove all the definitions
• Re-run Configure ConfigMgr Integration again, and select “Install the ConfigMgr extensions”

I also found that my site server needed to be rebooted after following the steps outlined above before the issue was resolved. This problem occurred on consecutive days a few weeks back but has yet to resurface since.

KB982399 - ConfigMgr site server stops responding while processing status messages

I find that from time to time a ConfigMgr site will stop responding. Some of the first symptoms that are noticed are software distribution will stop, site backups fail and you no longer get site status messages. In the Application event viewer you may notice the following error:

A timeout (30000 milliseconds) was reached while waiting for a transaction response from the SMS_EXECUTIVE service.

Generally restarting the SMS Executive service and the SMS Site Component Manger service or rebooting your site server will resolve the issue. (Temporarily) Microsoft has released a hotfix for ConfigMgr SP2 site servers that resolves this issue http://support.microsoft.com/kb/982399 According to the article the issue is caused by a deadlock situation in the SMS Executive service. I’ve applied the hotfix to one of my problematic site servers and I have not experienced a reoccurrence of this issue.

Windows XP SP3 - update.exe extended error code 0xf00d

Every once in a while an old Windows XP machine will make its way back onto our network – most of the time it’s an old laptop that has been sitting in someone’s desk or in some storage room. Machines are checked out for missing patches or Anti-Virus dat updates prior to the machine being added back onto our domain however once in a while a machine will be missed. For this reason we are still scanning for pre Windows XP SP3 machines and if one is detected SP3 is pushed to it so that the machine can catch up on patches. (We are looking at quarantine solution for rouge machines but that’s another story) The other day a Windows XP SP2 laptop was detected but the SP3 upgrade kept failing. The only sign of a problem in Event Viewer was an entry stating that the update had been cancelled and when I ran the update interactively, same thing.  When I checked the install log (C:\Windows\svcpack.log) it had the following entry: update.exe extended error code 0xf00d 

After some searching I found that if you browse to C:\Windows\System32 and rename spupdsvc.exe to something like spupdsvc.old and then reapply the update, spupdsvc.exe will get recreated and Service Pack 3 will complete successfully. 

Office File Validation Add-in Causes Excel 2003 Workbooks to open slower over networks

In an enterprise environment this is an understatement - test KB2501584 very carefully. During each patching cycle we roll out patches to about 400 workstations for testing in order to QA the deployment. Shortly after deploying the latest round of Microsoft patches we started to get reports of Excel 2003 would stop responding when trying to open up files across the network. Local workbooks were fine. When the exact symptoms were identified it wasn’t long before I found a Microsoft knowledgebase article outlining the same symptoms and referencing the Office File Validation Add-in (OFV) as the culprit.

Office 2007 and 2010 will copy the file locally and then validate it to see if it is safe to open. Office 2003 tries to complete this process across the network. A workbook that normally takes seconds to open was taking upwards of 10 – 15 minutes if the user had Excel 2003. (Keep in mind that this is across a well connected LAN)

Microsoft has published a workaround but as I quickly found out it had little effect. The registry key that is referenced in KB2570623:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Policies\Microsoft\Office\11.0\

According to this post should be:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Office\11.0

And then follow the steps outlined below:

1. After you select the key that is specified in step 3, point to New on the Edit menu, and then click Key.
2. Type Excel, and then press ENTER.
3. Select Excel, point to New on the Edit menu, and then click Key.
4. Type Security, and then press ENTER.
5. Select Security, point to New on the Edit menu, and then click Key.
6. Type FileValidation, and then press ENTER.
7. Select FileValidation, point to New on the Edit menu, and then click DWORD Value.
8. Type EnableOnLoad, and then press ENTER. (Note: The default value is 0 which disables the validation)

Once the correct key has been added to the user’s profile, workbooks will open normally using Excel 2003. Long story short upgrade to Office 2010.