COM

Trying to be a “Good Windows User”, I installed the last few Windows system updates. Unfortunately, I also need to be a “Good .Net Programmer”, and one of the recent security updates made it so that my local machine could not serve up ASP.NET pages anymore. I could surf to HTML pages on “localhost”, but trying to load up any of my local ASP.NET pages caused the WWW Publishing service to stop. The culprit was a conflict with COM+. I tracked it down to an error in the Application Event Log with the following message :

“The run-time environment has detected an inconsistency in its internal state. This indicates a potential instability in the process that could be caused by the custom components running in the COM+ application, the components they make use of, or other factors. Error in f:\xpsp3\com\com1x\src\comsvcs\package\cpackage.cpp(1184), hr = 80070002: InitEventCollector failed”

After trying a few solutions that didn’t work, I found out about the Windows update problem, and an approach to fix it here :
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/315296

I was able to repair my COM+ install using the method from that page. My machine is now telling me (again) that I have an important Windows system update to install, but I think I will hold off for a bit…I have actual work to do.