Object doesn't support this property or method

This is a short post about a very strange support case I had. I should start by mentioning however that you could see the same error for other reasons, not least of which because you’ve mistyped the property or method name :-).

In this particular case the customer had a class ASP web application that used VBScript. It would work for a long period of time (like days) but then begin to experience errors like the following:

Microsoft VBScript runtime error '800a01b6'
Object doesn't support this property or method: '<method name>'

These errors would become more and more frequent and the only solution my customer had found was to restart the process hosting the script. In his case that meant an IISRESET.

After much investigation and debugging we eventually figured out that he was hitting a variant of this issue:

You receive an error message if you try to start the VBScript engine from a Microsoft C++-based program on a Windows Server 2003 Service Pack 1-based computer

The underlying issue is specific to 32-bit processes that have a >2Gb address space available to them. Therefore this can occur both on 32-bit versions of Windows booted with the /3Gb switch in BOOT.INI as well as 64-bit versions of Windows where VBScript is hosted in a 32-bit process. (This is because 32-bit processes running on 64-bit systems have a 4Gb address space by default.)

The same underlying problem is also known to cause problems for the Scriptor component of Commerce Server:

FIX: You may receive a Scriptor component error message when you add the /3GB switch to the Boot.ini file on a Windows Server 2003 SP1-based computer that is running Commerce Server 2002 or Commerce Server 2007

HTH

Doug