Category Archives: Windows Server 2003

Windows ReportQueue Eating the Drive

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Working on a few system I have found that the following folder has filled up at times with error report files eating all available drive space.

C:\Users\All Users\Microsoft\Windows\Wer\ReportQueue\*

Now I know that this if you have files collecting here you might have bigger issues with the system and you should check that out in time. The files are safe to delete and will not cause any issues after removed. You can also disable error reporting on the system to stop the generation of the error reports.

Windows Installer Failure

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I was working on a server doing some cleanup of old applications when I was suddenly not able to uninstall or install applications anymore. I would get an error about the Windows Installer Service failing. I have a quick glance at the event logs and found this gem of an error:
Event Type: Warning
Event Source: MsiInstaller
Event ID: 1015
Description:
Failed to connect to server. Error: 0x8007041D
This error does not give a huge amount of details, but according to Microsoft it translates to “The system cannot find the path specified“. 

I tried several fixes including running the following commands. You must have the services console closed or it will not properly reset the service.
msiexec.exe /unreg
msiexec.exe /regserver

This did not correct the issue, I next found a direct uninstall command and executed it manually from the command line adding logging to the the command to see what the installer service was having an issue with.
c:\Windows\System32\msiexec.exe /i {ProductCode} /L*v c:\temp\msiexeclog.txt

This returned the following error code:
MSI (c) (44:98) [16:16:41:018]: MainEngineThread is returning 1601

I have now reached the point that it looks like reinstall of the Windows installer would be the fastest solution, to do this I first cleaned the old installer from the system using the following commands.
cd %windir%\system32
attrib -r -s -h dllcache
ren msi.dll msi.old
ren msiexec.exe msiexec.old
ren msihnd.dll msihnd.old

After restarting the system I downloaded and installed a new copy of the Windows Installer from Microsoft. After one more reboot I was able to continue application uninstalls on the server.