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Office

Office 2010 Professional Plus fails with unexpected restart on Windows XP

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The Situation

Office 2010 Professional Plus (32-bit) deployed to Windows XP Professional Service Pack 3 (32-bit) clients with System Center Configuration Manager (SCCM) 2007 R2 (64-bit). Office 2010 configured with Office Customization Tool (OCT) according to Microsoft guidelines.

The Problem

Upon completion the installation would initiate a forced reboot without prompting the user or giving any warning. After the reboot the Office 2010 installation would continue, but since it already completed before the reboot, this would be interpreted as a modification, prompting the user to select Add/Remove components, change product key etc. This, however, was not visible to the user since the program was configured to run without user interaction in SCCM. The result was that the Configuration Client (CcmExec) would wait for setup.exe for the maximum allowed run time and then terminate setup.exe, logging the installation as a failure. The whole process looked like this in the SCCM Advertisement Status report:

Time Message State Name Message Name Message ID Record ID
10.11.2011 12:37 Accepted Program received 10002 1164453
10.11.2011 12:37 Waiting Waiting for content 10035 1164454
10.11.2011 12:54 Running Program started 10005 1164461
11.11.2011 08:24 Failed Program failed (unexpected restart) 10021 1165171
11.11.2011 08:29 Running Program started 10005 1165174
11.11.2011 13:28 Failed Program failed (run time exceeded) 10070 1165445

Screenshot from SCCM

At 11.11.2011 08:29 Office 2010 restarts the installation after the reboot, even though it actually succeeded before the reboot, and the reboot is just to complete the installation. This is interpreted as a modification to the existing install and setup.exe prompts the user for what modifications to make. The user cannot see this, however, because he cannot interact with the program. CcmExec lets setup.exe run until the max run time is reached and then terminates setup.exe (11.11.2011 13:28) logging the install as a failure.

The Office 2010 setup log, located in %systemroot%System32Temp indicates that the install is successful, but that a restart is needed.

The Solution

To work around this problem it is necessary to suppress the reboot. This is done by adding the following to the MSP file in OCT (or the equivalent to config.xml):

image

With this setting in the MSP file the installation of Office 2010 will not be “fooled” by its own restart and complete successfully. You will first receive a status of Program completed successfully (reboot pending), until you initiate a restart on your own. After this restart the status will change to Program completed with success. Office 2010 seems to be fully functional even without performing this restart immediately, but the advertisement status in SCCM will not change until you restart.

Notes

Reports from other who have experiences similar issues indicate that the forced restart only happens on Windows XP computers, not Windows 7. I have not tested this myself.

References

Windows Server

SCVMM P2V and ISA Server 2006

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I recently upgraded my home network to Forefront Threat Management Gateway (TMG), retiring my old ISA Server 2006 server. I exported my ISA configuration and imported it into TMG, but to be on the safe side I decided to keep a copy of the server as a virtual machine. I used the P2V wizard in System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) R2, but after I hit the Scan System button this error appeared:

VMM is unable to complete the request. The connection to the agent <ISA Server FQDN> was lost.

Ensure that the computer <ISA Server FQDN> exists on the network, WMI service and the agent are installed and running and that a firewall is not blocking HTTP and WMI traffic.

ID: 3157
Details: The RPC server is unavailable (0x800706BA)

Preparing to run the P2V wizard I had already created a new access rule allowing all traffic between the SCVMM and ISA Server computers, and disabled the Strict RPC compliance on the rule:

Apparently something was interfering with the RPC communication. Since my P2V rule was at the top of the Firewall Policy whatever was causing the problem had to be in the System Policy. I displayed the System Policy in the Firewall Editor and looked through each rule that specified RPC communication to the ISA Server. Turns out there was only one; the Microsoft Management Console (MMC) rule. To successfully perform a P2V of an ISA Server you need to disable the Strict RPC compliance setting. There was no way to do that in the MMC rule in the System Policy. Since all System Policy rules are processed before the Firewall Rules the MMC rule matched the RPC traffic and blocked parts of it necessary for P2V. I disabled the MMC rule, leaving only my P2V rule. Now the wizard worked correctly.