You may experience problems when you use the Add/Remove Windows Components tool after you install a COM+ rollup package or a COM+ service pack in Windows Server 2003

When you use the Add/Remove Windows Components tool in Microsoft Windows Server 2003, you may experience one or more of the following problems:

• The settings are empty for the TCP/IP port ranges for the DCOM protocols.
• The Microsoft SQL Server service stops, and then the service does not automatically restart.
• The Distributed Transaction Coordinator (MSDTC) cluster resource is displayed in the cluster administrator, even if MSDTC is not installed.

These problems may occur after you install a COM+ rollup package or a COM+ service pack.

These problems may occur if the Windows Components Wizard detects a version mismatch for MSDTC. When this behavior occurs, the Windows Components Wizard reinstalls MSDTC.

The following RPC registry subkey is deleted as part of the MSDTC installation, and this deletion is by design:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Rpc\Internet

Note When the Internet registry subkey is deleted, the registry entries under the Internet registry subkey are also deleted. The following are the registry entries that are deleted:

• Ports (REG_MULTI_SZ)
• PortsInternetAvailable (REG_SZ)
• UseInternetPorts (REG_SZ)

The version mismatch occurs because the COM+ rollup package or the COM+ service pack does not update MSDTC version information in the registry.

Important This section, method, or task contains steps that tell you how to modify the registry. However, serious problems might occur if you modify the registry incorrectly. Therefore, make sure that you follow these steps carefully. For added protection, back up the registry before you modify it. Then, you can restore the registry if a problem occurs. For more information about how to back up and restore the registry, click the following article number to view the article in the Microsoft Knowledge Base: To work around these problems, manually update the MSDTC version number in the registry to a larger number than the number of the MSDTC version that you have installed.

Note Also make sure that this number is larger than the number of any MSDTC version that you plan to install.

To do this, follow these steps:

1. Click Start, click Run, type regedit, and then click OK.
2. Locate the following registry key, and then select this key:
   HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\MSDTC\Setup
3. In the details pane, double-click MinorVersion, type 0x0ece0b0a in the Value data box, and then click OK.
   
   Note In this example, 0x0ece0b0a is the value of the minor version of the most-recently released hotfix.