Posted by on Nov 24, 2010 in General | 0 comments

So this was a weird one.

I was installing a law firm case management program for a client (no names, but rhymes with “Babacus”), and during the install a reboot was required.  At the time, everything seemed to be working correctly, and I continued on my merry way.  However, a couple of hours later, I got a call saying that Blackberries were not receiving emails, and that Outlook Web Access (OWA) was not available.  I tried to connect to OWA, and received this error after login:

503 Service Unavailable

I then looked at the Blackberry Enterprise Server (BES) services, and they were all down, as was Backup Exec.  The BES services, when trying to restart them, would give a “service-specific error code 5003”.  After searching for the Blackberry error code to no avail, as well as multiple other sites to try to fix the OWA and other errors, I resorted to calling MS Support.

Which was supposed to call me back within 2 hours.

Which called me back almost 5 hours after my initial call (and after two calls to them for an update).

After spending some quality time with the tech, we finally boiled it down to a set of .dll files in Drive:Program FilesCommon FilesSystemOle DB.  After trying to re-register the .dll files, one (oledb32.dll) would refuse to register with this error:

LoadLibrary(“oledb32.dll”) failed – The Specified procedure could not be found.

This included following KB 838176, which didn’t really apply, but was all about moving a clean copy of the .dll to both the target directory and the .dll cache.  No joy.  We even reinstalled Exchange SP2 on the machine.

What finally fixed it was re-installing Windows 2003 SP 2 on the machine.  After a reboot, all was sunshine and lollypops.  OWA, BES and BackupExec all started up and ran without complaint.

Yay!