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You are here: Home / Operating System / Windows 2008 / MMC error 18ea3f92-d6aa–41d9-a205-2023400c8fbb

Oct 30, 2010 By Jared Heinrichs 63 Comments

MMC error 18ea3f92-d6aa–41d9-a205-2023400c8fbb

The other day about 1/2 way into the day I get a call from a client saying “we haven’t received any emails all day”. I automatically go to the exchange server to look at the services. I noticed most of the exchange services were running. IIS and two Exchange services weren’t running however. What made this a bit tricky was all the client computers said that exchange was up and running. They just couldn’t send or receive emails.

The next thing I did was to go look in the Error Event Log on the server. When I went to open the MMC for the server manager it came back with the error: 18ea3f92-d6aa–41d9-a205-2023400c8fbb. I tried a few other things that used MMC’s and almost all of them came back with that same error: 18ea3f92-d6aa–41d9-a205-2023400c8fbb.

After doing some searches most people gave up and redid their servers if they got this error. Some of the things they had suggested I tried. Still nothing.

I thought, I wonder if I remotely opened up the event viewer. I entered the server name.Voila! I could see all the errors.

After further inspections I found what seemed to be the error that started them all. It was Event 5173 – WAS. The error read:

  • The Windows Process Activation Service encountered an error trying to read configuration data for config section ‘system.applicationHost/webLimits’ from file ‘\\?\C:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework64\v2.0.50727\CONFIG\machine.config’, line number ‘146’.  The error message is: ‘The configuration section ‘system.serviceModel’ cannot be read because it is missing a section declaration
    ‘.  The data field contains the error number.

I went to that folder and opened the machine.config file. It’s an XML file that contains a bunch of configuration information about the machine for .net. When I saw that file I figured that there was going to be some crazy ASCII characters in it. Everything seemed to be fine.

According to this Microsoft KB the server supposedly backs up files in another location. Don’t even bother. No dice.

I did notice in the C:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework64\v2.0.50727\CONFIG folder that there was a machine.config.default file. It was from several years ago and it was 2kb smaller then the current file which was 22kb. I renamed the current machine.config file  and called it machine.config.old and made a copy of the “default” file. I renamed it to machine.config.

I went into services and started World Wide Web service. It took a few seconds but it started! I then proceeded to go and start the rest of the services that should have auto started with the machine. They all started! I went and checked my Outlook client. The emails in the outbox had already left. Within about 20 minutes the mail was flowing again like it should have been.

Hopefully this helps anyone who had the same issues I had.

Filed Under: Windows 2008 Tagged With: How To

Comments

  1. Indra says

    Mar 12, 2012 at 5:40 am

    Thanks! Was about to go in for a rebuild, till I found this! 🙂

  2. Nico says

    Mar 12, 2012 at 11:02 pm

    Thanks a lot! Worked like a charm, even on a W2k8 x86 machine. But for me the things that broke down were: server manager / event viewer (very annoying, makes it hard to troubleshoot) / task scheduler.
    You’ve saved me a load of work by sharing this solution!
    (I didn’t even had to restart the World Wide Web service, just closing and re-opening server manager seemed to do the trick for me)

  3. Mustu says

    Apr 15, 2012 at 10:59 pm

    Thanks dude. This worked out well for me!.

  4. Douggiet says

    May 8, 2012 at 1:45 pm

    Thanks, this worked for me as well!

  5. Malman says

    Jul 11, 2012 at 4:05 pm

    This is something I’ve had happen several times. Seems like each time the fix is something completely different. This time it happened on a freshly installed Server 2008 VM. After running all updates, the Server Manager snap-in simply wouldn’t work. I knew it wasn’t an issue with .NET 3.5 as has been the case in the past, so I wasn’t sure what to do… until I came to this blog post!

    Thank you for writing this post, it worked perfectly!

  6. Jorn says

    Jul 27, 2012 at 4:31 am

    Perfect!!!!! Worked for me

  7. Mary says

    Jul 31, 2012 at 5:52 am

    Thanks! This not only fixed MMC but also SQL Server Manager Studio.
    I had to replace the machine.config in two places:
    C:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework64\v2.0.50727\CONFIG
    and
    C:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.50727\CONFIG

  8. david g says

    Aug 17, 2012 at 5:24 pm

    OMG….. Thank you so very much!

  9. BillyG says

    Dec 13, 2012 at 9:33 am

    Thanks for the post this fixed my problem. However the problem seems to re-appear again after a month or so and the file goes from 20kb to 22kb?

  10. Rufus says

    Jan 24, 2013 at 3:50 am

    Thanks.

  11. Peter Efseaff says

    Mar 21, 2013 at 8:58 am

    Hey Jared, just wanted to add myself to the long list of thankful Windows users and to say that I had given up on trying to find a fix. Found a link back to you and in less than a minute all fixed. Thank you Jared. I now dub thee genius… Blessings to you..

  12. Chris says

    Oct 15, 2015 at 7:16 am

    Great Job Jared. After many searches through Microsoft articles and much disappointment, I finally found your article. This fix took all of five minutes. Rockin and rollin without a hitch. Thanks!

  13. none none says

    Dec 30, 2015 at 6:58 am

    Windows 2012 R2 I had to change the machine.conf in this directory:
    C:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework64\v4.0.30319\Config

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