ICQ Damages IIS?

The other day I downloaded ICQ5 which is the latest version as of today. Since their installer isn’t smart enough to detect a previous version, it created a mess. I went and uninstalled both of them, and weird things started happening.

When I pulled up any web project in VS.NET, I’d get this error:

Visual Studio cannot create or open the application because the Web server on this computer is not running. Start the Web server before proceeding.

So I went to Administrative Tools | Services, found the World Wide Web Publishing service in the list, noticed it was stopped, so I hit the Start button. That didn’t go well because the web service failed to start.

I headed to the Event Viewer and noticed this error message:

The COM+ System Application service terminated unexpectedly

which, of course, doesn’t amount to much. Another error entry in the Event Viewer from COM+ itself was uselessly cryptic.

Anyway, depending on what exactly caused this mess in the first place, you might have to reinstall COM+ or even repair your Windows XP installation. Luckily, the solution to my problem was much simpler.

From command line run these two commands: regsvr32 ole32.dll and regsvr32 oleaut32.dll which registers these two damn COM servers again.

A Word About ICQ

ICQ is one of those notorious applications/businesses which never shipped. For years and years they only delivered betas after betas. They are like a ship that lost all navigation equipment, and the crew has no idea which way they are drifting. There’s no development timeline, no commitment to deliver a bug free product, and even no consistency in UI from one version to another. We’ll see how this story ends. When they go belly up I ain’t gonna cry a river.

There are a number of unofficial ICQ clients, such as GAIM and Trillian that are aesthetically pleasing and actually work. And technically if you hack Windows Messenger or MSN Messenger the same was as "Messenger Plus!" then you can hack in your own ICQ support to WM or MSN Messenger quite easily. (That is, if you've got the time to spend hours a day experimenting with undocumented APIs in C++ ;) )

Believe me, I once did. I wrote a low-level MSN client (COM server) in C++. That took a bit of hacking with a network protocol analyzer.

I was in the exact same situation also having uninstalled ICQ and this helped me. thanks a lot!

tks!! it works! ICQ Suxs!

Man, this saved me! thank you!

thnks!!! a friend of mine find this site and told me how could i fix this terrible problem... and yes icq suxs :P

thanks a lot! big help! thank you.

I had the same problem but didn't realise that ICQ caused it. I spent 2 days trying to figure out what suddenly went wrong .
Then I read this article and it Solved. Thanks a million.

Thank you!!!

Thanks alot! I can't believe this solution... well actually I can but anyway. Brilliant.

thanks....it works again....

I have no words. Two days I spent by googling everything possible. I told Bill off that it was cause by any new Win Update. Unortunately I have to appologise. Thank you a lot.

God bless you! You've saved me lots of time... I just imagine myself reinstalling my system time after time (and ICQ5 of course... Slide-O-Lama is great, you have to admit) and sitting helpless not being able to figure out what's hapening.

I'm printing myself an ICQ flower to use on the shooting range, man am I angry!

Now I've switched to GAIM and I'm a happy bloke! :)

I had the same error,
with other version of ICQ.
and had pretty much the same way to solve it.

http://raba.pashabitz.com/2005/12/10/ICQInstallationStrangeErrors.aspx

hey this command saved me .. thanks a lot

man you rule!!!!
i didnt believe that this strange bug came from the the lame ICQ.
this solution rocks!!!!

You saved my live!!Million times thanks!!

Dude, u saved my ass right now, I was completely desperate...

Thanx

Thank you very much!!! You saved me too.

Thank you so much. I spent 4 hours today to understand the problem.

Thanks a ton!!! I don't have ICQ...but did have Skype installed that hyjacks Port 80 as well. These regsvr32 calls fixed my setup and saved me a TON of time.

Excellent article, it helped me in a minutes to get my IIS working again!

Thans a lot, cheers !

P.S.: ICQ is one of the application I HATE - global keyboard hooks, 10000 dlls, hard to configure... hope they soon will byte the dust

Wow. Like everyone else said, THANKYOU! I'll never use ICQ again, and now have a solid reason to tell others not to use it. What a complete disaster that little team of developer wannabes caused.

Quick fix for a potentially horrible day of searching in the dark. Thanks again!

Unbelievable! I cannot believe ICQ has caused it. I have Trillian - and it works fine, but I remember installing and uninstalling ICQ on my machine. Thanks a BUNCH! You SAVED me lots of time trying to figure it out on my own! ICQ is evil!

I just wanted to say THANK YOU. My WWW Publishing service was stopping intermittently until I reregistered the COM servers and restarted both the WWW Publishing and COM+ services.

Before I applied the fix, I couldn't see any of my pages on IIS.

Whoever you are, I owe you.