WMI Corruption HotFix ready, KB Article coming

At MMS 2007, Microsoft indicated they had found the cause of WMI corruption issues.  They also noted that a HotFix for it would be released soon.

If you want this HotFix now, you can call Microsoft support to obtain it.  It is HotFix #933062.

Look for a KB Article on this soon.

UPDATE – May 17, 2007

From Dan Conley (Microsoft) as posted to the SMS Email discussion list:

I just finished talking to one of the SMS Escalation Engineers about this KB. (In fact, the one that discussed it at MMS)

The key takeaway is that the hot fix will be publically posted soon, therefore there is no need to call into support to request it.

The hot fix referenced in this thread represents WMI stability enhancements from Vista being ported back to XP and Server 2003.

These changes are designed to increase the resiliency of the WMI Repository in an effort to prevent corruption (it's not a 100% guarantee).

The KB articles associated with these (with more detail) are being worked on at a high priority, but you should also know these fixes will be posted to the Microsoft Download Center fairly soon.

These are proactive fixes, and are not designed to repair clients that are already in a broken state.

As a result, for most environments there should not be a need to call into Support immediately to request these, but rather wait until they are posted (current ETA's below).

• Windows Server 2003 Post SP2 (x86,x64,ia64) and Windows XP Post SP2 x64 - KB 933061 - May 22.

• Windows XP Post SP2 x86 - KB933062 - June 26.  The delay is due to some earlier build issues (since resolved) which resulted in missing the window to get content posted to the download center.

These are estimates, but if there are significant changes (days) in either direction we'll make sure the list knows.

There is generally no one specific symptom that is associated with corruption of the WMI Repository.

Corruption issues can be broadly defined as cases where data expected in the repository is missing and can neither be retrieved or added back to the database.  Something like an Access Denied or Provider Load Failure is rarely an indicator of a truly corrupt repository.

We also recommend usage of the WMIDiag script for troubleshooting WMI issues.  The script is available from here:

http://www.microsoft.com/technet/scriptcenter/topics/help/wmidiag.mspx

I hope this brings clarity to this situation.

-Dan-