Reinstalling / Rebuilding COM+ on Windows 2008

Unlike on Windows 2003 it is not possible to Reinstall/Rebuild COM+ on Windows 2008 without effectively reinstalling the operating system. Before undertaking such an extreme step the question of why COM+ needs to be installed should be addressed.

A common reason for this is due to the errors shown below:

For example:

The COM+ Event System detected a bad return code during its internal processing. HRESULT was 800700e6 from line 45 of d:\longhorn\com\complus\src\events\tier \eventsystemobj.cpp. Please contact Microsoft Product Support Services to report this error.

The COM+ Event System detected a bad return code during its internal processing. HRESULT was 80080005 from line 45 of d:\longhorn\com\complus\src\events\tier1\eventsystemobj.cpp. Please contact Microsoft Product Support Services to report this error

To address this issue without reinstalling the OS, consider reviewing the registry key:

                “HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\EventSystem”

If, after making a comparison to an identically versioned machine the key is found to be mismatched, you could try to backup and overwrite to bad key to see if it assists in resolving the errors.

Original post by Chris Forster 5th May 2010 here: https://blogs.msdn.com/b/chrisforster/archive/2010/05/25/reinstalling-rebuilding-com-on-windows-2008.aspx