All IIS Services become unavailable after applying Microsoft update KB973917

All IIS Services become unavailable after applying Microsoft update KB973917

Problem:

We applied some Microsoft critical updates, and when our E-Notebook users try to connect to the ELN, they receive an error message:

"Sorry , an error occurred while opening a client connection: while setting up connection to central database: The request failed with HTTP Status
503:Service Unavailable".


Contents of the event log:

"Event Type: Error
Event Source: W3SVC-WP
Event Category: None
Event ID: 2269
Date: 18/01/2010
Time: 10:14:40
User: N/A
Computer: UK1ELNWEB1
Description:
The worker process failed to initialize the http.sys communication or the w3svc communication layer and therefore could not be started. The data field contains the error number.
For more information, see Help and Support Center at http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/events.asp.
Data:
0000: 57 00 07 80 "


Affected systems:

WebServer - Windows Server 2003 SP2 (where SP2 was installed after SP1), IIS 6.0, ELN or COUE installed.
The issue is risen up only in case when core IIS dll versions (before applying KB973917) are older than provided with SP2.


Explanation:

Users can't login to the ELN as ENService in IIS becomes unavailable. The issue affects IIS at all, that is why all services (ELN and COUE related) are not working properly.

Consider the following scenario. You have an Internet Information Services (IIS) 6.0 web server running on Windows Server 2003 Service Pack 2. The Microsoft update KB973917 gets installed on the server. After installing KB973917, the IIS 6.0 application pools cannot start up successfully. See also http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2009746.




Solution:

To resolve this problem, reinstall Service Pack 2 for Windows Server 2003 on the web server. This will bring all IIS 6.0 components up to the correct file versions, and will maintain the installation of the KB973917 update. Reinstalling the KB973917 update should not be necessary.


References:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2009746,
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/973917 (the list of core IIS binaries).