After my last experience with running BizTalk on Windows XP SP2 RC1 , I got real brave! I uninstalled RC1 and installed RC2. And guess what! Once again, BizTalk 2004 no longer ran!
This time I got a different error than what I was getting after upgrading to RC1. When I tried to start or stop an orchestration, I got a nice, little dialog box telling me:
Unable to update BizTalk host:
Invalid namespace.
I immediately checked the registry to see if the value I added got lost during the uninstall - upgrade process. Just in case the missing value would manifest itself differently than it did in RC1. But no, that value was still there.
Since Google didn't have any answers for me, I had to do some more digging. Finally, CIM Studio, from the WMI tools showed that there was no WMI namespace registered for the BizTalk management classes. With the WMI provider for BizTalk 2004 installed the screeshot below would show a node for a namespace named Microsoft BizTalk Server.
A more desciptive error message could have pointed me to the source quicker. After all, in the context of BizTalk, people think of XML namespaces or .NET namespaces long before they remember about WMI/CIM namespaces.
To fix the problem, I and re-installed the WMI provider for BizTalk by running the BizTalk installer in repair mode. Now the BizTalk namespace is registered in WMI again
and everything runs normal.