Illegal operation attempted on a registry key marked for deletion

Question

Seemingly randomly, one of my development servers started giving the following error upon attempting login to the Tridion CM (2011 SP1-2)

Retrieving the COM class factory for component with CLSID {9926D1CF-F158-418F-A9A2-B653B497D982} failed due to the following error: 80004005 Unspecified error

The COM+ process was running but attempting to stop or start it gave an error (apologies, i was unable to capture this error) and continued running. I checked my services and all were stopped apart from the 'Tridion Content Distributor Transport Service' which was 'Stopping', but never actually stopped.

Attempting to start any of the other Tridion services gave

The dependency service or group failed to start

There were no errors in the event logs around the time this COM+ issue began occurring.

After a restart of the server and the COM+ and all services were running correctly and I could log into my CM, however, I then received the following error (in the ribbon) when attempting to expand or view a folder:

Illegal operation attempted on a registry key marked for deletion

Under Event Viewer -> Window Logs -> Application:

Windows detected your registry file is still in use by other applications or services. The file will be unloaded now. The applications or services that hold your registry file may not function properly afterwards.

I restarted COM+ and all services, the error no longer appears.

My question is what could have caused the registry file to become unloaded?

Answer 1

I had this error a while back too. I never found out what exactly caused it, but it seems some kind of update/install took place on the machine that required a reboot. However the machine had not been restarted. This is a vague explanation I got by googling the error.

The good part is that after reboot, the error went away. I remember on one server I had to perform 2 reboots.

Answer 2

I recall some time ago that a Microsoft update stopped COM+ services - this may be the one here ... http://support.microsoft.com/kb/909444 - perhaps something has slipped through here (if this is the case then maybe more user can comment on here too).

If you have the time I would sift through the logs and see if there was any sort of update (Microsoft http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/0fe56dce-20b2-44e3-abd2-6c72f91ffa19/turn-off-automatic-updates-windows-server-2008-standard-sp2?forum=winservergen/ JAVA http://www.java.com/en/download/help/java_update.xml#sched / other apps) that may have run in the background since the last reboot.

In the meantime I would ensure that JAVA is set to not update and that Windows Update is switched off and managed (if not already obviously) - the same to be said of any other apps that may exist in the environment you're working on.

Answer 3

The COM+ class factory error is highly indicative of memory pressure problems. So this could be a memory leak. Once your system is unstable enough for this to happen, you pretty much can't trust any of the other exceptions you see nearby. Having said that, I would also follow up on the other suggestions you've had here.

Also - as it's your transport service, I would also pay attention to the handle count. We've seen handle leaks.

I suspect you've got at least two distinct problems. What I'm describing is the first, but the rest of your symptoms were probably just waiting for your next reboot to show up.