In the last week I've had two separate incidents where KB973917 was installed on a server and it either prevented a formerly working SharePoint farm from working, or it prevented a clean machine from getting SharePoint installed. I wanted to add a blog post to the chorus of blog posts already out there on this, to make it easier for folks to find.
The first problem I encountered was a MOSS farm running on 64 bit Windows 2003 server. It had been happily running for months. Now all of a sudden whenever someone tried to hit it with a web browser they were met with an "Internal Server Error" and the Application Pool would crash with "Unknown error." The app pool would restart, but would crash again as soon as someone hit it. This was with all web apps, including Central Admin. To make things more confusing, SharePoint itself seemed to be fine. I could use STSADM to do anything STSADM does and it worked great. I could enumerate sites and webs, anything. IIS seemed to be broken, not SharePoint. I asked the customer what they had changed, and they answered, "Nothing." J In their defense, it had been over two weeks since they had applied any patches. Our friend KB973917 was in that list though. I had seen something go across Twitter about a patch breaking SharePoint, but I hadn't paid much attention. I looked through all the patches that had been installed in the last round and started searching on Bing for "<patch> SharePoint." Searching for "KB973917 SharePoint" yielded me a bunch of hits with titles that suggested this might be what I was looking for. Particularly KB2009746 hit the nail on the head and described exactly what I was seeing. Contrary to what the KB said, I did uninstall the evil KB973917, and that alone didn't fix the issue. When I reinstalled SP2 for Windows Server 2003 though IIS started working again, and therefore SharePoint was happy. I probably could have just reinstalled SP2 and been fine.
Today I stumbled onto another problem that was caused by KB973917. I had a fresh build of Windows Server 2008 and I was blessing it with an install of MOSS 2007. SP2 for MOSS was built in. The install went very quickly until it got to the "Applying Updates" part where it installs the patches that are slipstreamed. This went very, very slow. After 35 minutes it crashed, giving me the "Windows is looking for a solution" message box. This was odd. I had heard of something similar to this (though not identical) before, and it was caused by the security on the box being very tight and SharePoint not being able to write to places in the file system and Registry that it needed to. I removed all GPOs that had been pushed down, and disabled UAC and tried again. Same failure. There were no clues in the event log. The SharePoint installer log was very little help, it really only showed this:
Executing command path: 'C:\Program Files (x86)\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\SERVER12\Server Setup Controller\wrapinst.exe', args: 'timeout=2950 MsiPath=msxml\msxml6.msi'
Error: Command: 'C:\Program Files (x86)\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\SERVER12\Server Setup Controller\wrapinst.exe' failed to return after 600000 milliseconds Type: CommandFailed.
Error: Command: 'C:\Program Files (x86)\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\SERVER12\Server Setup Controller\wrapinst.exe' failed to return after 600000 milliseconds Type: CommandFailed.
Error: Command: 'C:\Program Files (x86)\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\SERVER12\Server Setup Controller\wrapinst.exe' failed to return after 600000 milliseconds Type: CommandFailed.
Catalyst execution finished: 01/04/2010 12:10:32. Return code: 30008. Exception caught: CommandFailed.
PERF: TickCount=4334578 Name=RunSetup Description=End function
There was my 35 minutes, 600000 milliseconds (10 minutes) at a time. I did some searching and nothing really jumped out. At this point I wondered if something was wrong with the machine, so we jumped over to another machine and tried to install. Same problem. Three attempts, three failures. I tried a few more things to no avail. Almost as a joke I suggested to the customer to uninstall the evil KB973917 and install SP2 for Windows Server 2008. I suggested that only because it seemed the last part of the SharePoint install was trying to configure IIS on the box, and KB973917 broke IIS on the Windows 2003 box I had seen the week before. We did it and SharePoint installed successfully. Another SharePoint casualty of the much maligned KB973917.
I don't completely understand why this patch is wreaking such havoc on IIS and SharePoint. I want to get this post out in case anyone else is having weird problems and can't quite seem to stitch it all together. I've wasted too many hours on this bugger myself, hopefully I can save you folks an hour or two. J
tk