Dave - what's your deployment architecture like? Do you have several WSS nodes that are consolidated under a (root) SP2K3 Portal Server? Are the WSS nodes (& users) in various domains? I think it may have to do with user accounts (& access). Some clues here - http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;823278

Post your findings (please!).

SBC, Thanks so much for your thoughts. The KB seems to confirm that this "Cannot complete this action" runtime is a generic error message. A screenshot of my runtime error is below. It will be interesting to figure out what the problem turns out to be... Thx!

http://dbvt.com/x/blog/2004/spserror.gif

Hi,

We're struggling against the same darn error:

"Cannot complete this action.

Please try again."

We're trying to move our SharePoint Portal Server 2003 from one machine to another using the backup and restore tool. However, when we restore, the SharePoint Sites go live OK without any problems but the SharePoint Portal Server 2003 insists on returning that error ...

Any clue of what we might be doing wrong? Can anyone point me to any step-by-step or «how-to» guide on accomplishing this task of moving a SharePoint Portal Server 2003 from one machine to another machine?

Thanks in advance.

My kind regards,
Pedro Serrano

Pedro, I'm pretty sure this "Cannot complete" error represents MANY issues. I will definitely post my personal resolution here, or feel free to email me later to see if I've found out anything. Hopefully it will be soon!!!

Hi,

I am having exactly the same problem and it is driving me nuts...

I tried the MS resolution under http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=823278&FR=1#appliesto, without much change... :(

I am using it in a different scenario than youguys, though:

SPSite ospSite = new SPSite("http://localhost:90/");
SPWeb ospWeb = ospSite.OpenWeb();
//Create a search against the lists in our web
SPSearchResultCollection ospSearchResults;
ospSearchResults = ospWeb.SearchListItems("staff");
output.Write( ospSearchResults.Count.ToString());
foreach(SPSearchResult ospSearchResult in ospSearchResults) {
output.Write( ospSearchResult.Title + " URL: " + ospSearchResult.Url);
}

It crashes at the line
ospSearchResults = ospWeb.SearchListItems("staff");


Any idea out there?

Many thank in advance to any clue!

Nico

Nico,
Oh heck, I've been through that KB several times. :-) It doesn't matter what scenario. When you reference the Microsoft.Sharepoint DLL, and .OpenWeb(), any method or property call generates the same error.

There are a ton of newsgroup posts out there with this generic "cannot continue" error, but nothing for our WSS2003 coding issue.

And what is so weird is that its working flawlessly on a staging server of mine, but NOT on my development server. How can I develop using the Sharepoint library though? :-)

If I find a fix I will DEFINITELY be posting it everywhere I can. I'm still dead in the water after installing, uninstalling, changing service user configurations, and more.

Thanks so much for your notes. I feel your pain.

First, open up IE
Second, select Tools > Internet Options > click the Security tab
Third, select Internet > then click the Custom Level button to pull up Security Settings
Forth, scroll to the very bottom of the settings where it says 'User Authentication' > select the second option 'Automatic logon..' (if you want to be prompted for logon info > select the 'Prompt for username and password).

Also, I would set this the same for Local intranet

Hit 'OK' and close your browser. Open up IE again and go to your portal.

I hope this is what you were asking for and that it helps.

Paul D, This is excellent advice. Thanks! I didn't know about the auto login custom settings options. I'll definitely remember it.

The Cannot Complete This Action problem using the MS.Sharepoint.dll library has been solved by adding "impersonate=true" to the web.config. Below is the URL.

Thanks again for taking the time to point out the User Authentication setting to me.

http://weblogs.asp.net/dburke/archive/2004/06/30/170270.aspx

I got this error because I was using impersonation within my code WindowsIdentity(). After looking at my code, I actually didn't need this and it resolved that error message. I got the error message when I called the URL property of SPWeb AFTER I did the impersonation. Calling it before worked fine...

I had the same error (after the site ran fine for 15 months) when trying to delete files, directories, sites, anything.  I had checked everything possible on the web server and was at my wits end so finally I went on to the database server and found out that the disk was out of space!  The problem was that the transaction log had grown to 12GB and filled the drive.  A quick shrink and everything worked fine.

Don't flame me, I didn't setup the DB server.  Yes, I setup a db maint plan to keep that from happening again.  Sheesh that was ridiculous.  I wanted it to be something complicated and of course it was something simple.  Always is.