I recently had a total nightmare with Office 2007 Enterprise on windows 2008 server. Some of my office applications stopped working so I tried to repair it, but the setup file would not run off the DVD nor would add/remove programs run, always failing with the error below, as a result I was not able to uninstall office.

"setup has stopped working"

I originally thought it was my DVD player, so I went out and bought a new one, which didn't help.

The solution to get the office installer to work was quite a PITA to say the least

1. First read this Microsoft KB article
   How to manually uninstall the 2007 Office system if you cannot uninstall it by using the "Add or Remove Programs" feature
2. Also run the Windows Installer Cleanup Utility
   http://support.microsoft.com/kb/290301

After doing all this and getting office off my PC I was finally able to run the office setup, but alas this then threw another error during installation.

**************

Microsoft Office Enterprise 2007 encountered an error during setup.

Error 1402. Setup cannot open the registry key

UNKNOWN\Components\3D5095D39455BD341908312EDABA9DD8\00002109F10090400000000000F01FEC. Verify that you have sufficient permissions to access the registry or contact Microsoft Product Support Service (PSS) for assistance.

***********

Now this was especially confusing as that registry key does not actually exist. I tried numerous things to resolve this and ultimately failed, so now I was stumped and thought I was going to have to either re-install windows or stump up £250 for Microsoft support. Then I wondered if I could get any free partner support through my Microsoft Action Pack Subscription (MAPS), and discovered these forums. Which surprisingly turned out to be very helpful as I got a reply from a Microsoft Tech who helped me resolve this issue.

As I had already tried everything they suggested, they decided it was in fact a permissions issue, somehow my registry permissions had got screwed, but thankfully they also have a fix for this.

How do I restore security settings to the default settings?

http://support.microsoft.com/Default.aspx?id=313222

After applying this fix I was finally able to re-install Office 2007.

This solutions above should help anyone on XP, Windows Vista, Windows 2003 or 2008 server, it can also be applied to other software you are getting similar errors with.

On my windows 2008 server (64bit) I started having a problem whereby the wmiprvse.exe process was consuming up to 40% of my CPU (22% average) and causing major slowdown of my system.

I managed to narrow this down to the "Windows System Resource Manager" and if I stopped this service, then the problem would go away. None of the solutions I found on Google applied to my scenario or my OS, which is one of the issues I guess I will face for running windows 2008 server as a workstation.

Anyway after much searching, I discovered the following hot fix solved my problem, despite the fact that the symptoms or cause do not apply to my scenario at all as I am not doing any monitoring from an external machine. After installing this hot fix, my average CPU usage for wmiprvse.exe is now around 10% and only seems to hit about 20% max, so it is an improvement. Of course if you do not need the Windows System Resource Manager then you could just disable this permanently.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/970520

Note that the hot fix says it is for Vista, but it does also apply to windows 2008 server.

For those of you playing with Windows 2008 server, Microsoft have released another funky new tool for IIS7. The IIS Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Toolkit helps Web developers, hosting providers, and Web server administrators to improve their Web site’s relevance in search results by recommending how to make the site content more search engine-friendly.

The components of IIS Search Engine Optimization Toolkit include the following features:

• Site Analysis:

  • Fully featured site crawling engine - in order to perform detailed analysis of site's structure and content, Site Analysis tool uses a built-in web crawler, called "iisbot

    ", to download and cache all the publicly available web site content. The web crawler is fully compliant with robots exclusion protocol.

  • Report summary dashboard - the results of site analysis are presented in an easy to use dashboard page that serves as a start page for various types of analysis. In addition this page includes a large set of pre-built queries for most common reports.

  • Query builder - Site Analysis tool includes a powerful and flexible query builder user interface that lets you create any custom queries that are run against the cached web site content.

  • Detailed URL information - you can obtain various detailed information about every URL in your web site, such as response headers and content, the pages that link to that URL as well as all the referenced URLs.

  • Detailed Violations descriptions - each content or SEO violation found on a web site has a detailed description as well as a recommended corrective action.

  • Word Analysis - any web page can be analyzed with regards to the most commonly used words and phrases within the content of that page. The results of that analysis can be used to select the keywords that most accurately describe the content of the page.

  • Route Analysis - unique routes to any page can be displayed in a separate report. This kind of information helps better understand how search engine and site visitors reach a particular page on your web site.

• Robots Exclusion

  • User interface for editing robots.txt file - the content of the robots exclusion file - robots.txt - can be edited by using IIS Manager GUI

  • Selecting URL paths from physical view of web site - the paths that are specified for "Allow" and "Disallow" directives in robots.txt file can be selected from the physical file system layout of your web site.

  • Selecting URL paths from virtual view of web site - the paths that are specified for "Allow" and "Disallow" directives in robots.txt file can be selected from the logical view of your web site obtained from the results of site analysis.

• Sitemaps and Sitemap Indexes

  • User interface for managing sitemap and sitemap indexes files - the content of the sitemap and indexes files can be edited by using IIS Manager GUI

  • Selecting URLs from physical view of web site - the URLs that are specified within a sitemap can be selected from the physical file system layout of your web site.

  • Selecting URLs from virtual view of web site - the URLs that are specified within a sitemap can be selected from the logical view of your web site obtained from the results of site analysis.

Articles

• Using IIS Search Engine Optimization Toolkit
• Using Site Analysis to Crawl a Web Site
• Using Site Analysis Reports

Forum

• IIS Search Engine Optimization Toolkit Forum

As you will see elsewhere on my blog, I have recently setup windows 2008 server 64bit as my new desktop. For the most part everything has worked ok, but there have been a few interesting quirks.

One of these quirks was that any new site I setup in IIS7 resulted in a "500 internal server error" identifying the AboMapperCustom wildcard application mapping for ColdFusion as the cause.

Now my Default Web Site from where I run the CFADMIN was working fine, so I was rather perplexed as to why other sites did not work when they seemed to be setup exactly the same.

Now I am actually using DotNotPanel on my local machine to setup and manage sites, so this may be a contributing factor, but still the cause of the problems may affect others, so hopefully the solutions may help.

Using the Web Server Configuration Tool I tried to disable then enable CFML on the server several times to no avail, then when checking the Handler Mappings" for the site, I noticed that the wildcard application map for CF was actually there twice, which I am sure may well have been a contributing factor, so I removed one of them. I also then noticed this alert on the handler mappings page.

This site is in an application pool that is running in classic mode,
so you can manage ISAPI extension and native modules that are mapped to 
paths. You must manage managed handlers (system.web/httphandlers) directly 
in the configuration files.

Now if I recall "classic mode" means 32bit, so this seemed likely to be causing a problem, although I am not sure how I ended up using this application pool by default.

Anyway to change this, open the IIS manager, find your site, right click and select

Manage Web –> Advanced Settings

And change the application pool at the top to "Default Application Pool". In my case this fixed the problem and the alert went away, hopefully this may help someone else having issues with IIS7 and CF.

The inevitable has been happening the last couple of months, my windows XP machine has started to become slow and unstable and prone to crashing and was due for a reinstall. Never a task one looks forward to when you have a lot of software installed, much of which you do not have CD's for and have no idea where any of your driver CD's are either.

I had a spare machine sitting around on which I had installed Windows Vista for testing, and so I was about to bite the bullet and start using that instead of re-installing XP. Then a friend of mine suggested I try Windows 2008 server 64bit. He said he had switched from Vista and it was definitely a better experience and all of his software worked.

Well as I subscribe to the Microsoft Action Pack I had a copy of 2008 Server Std edition, so I thought I would give it a try, although I was very sceptical  about all my software not only working in 2008 Server but also working in 64 bit. But as a web developer it is much more convenient to run a server OS and have to work within the limitations of your workstation. For one you will have a full copy of IIS at your disposal, so no need to go messing about with Apache if you don't have to, and to be honest the only reason to bother with Apache these days is a) because you are on Windows XP and have the 1 site limited version of IIS or b) because your live sites run on Apache. There may be some instances where you need a very specific feature of Apache, but for most people this is very unlikely as IIS has been able to do everything Apache can do for quite some time now, and with IIS7 you are more than spoilt for choice with new features and configuration options.

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