COM: Intermittent error 800703fa: Illegal Operation attempted on a registry key

Intermittent error 800703fa: Illegal Operation attempted on a registry key

You may encounter the error 800703fa intermittently while running an application on IIS.

 

Error details:

Retrieving the COM class factory for component with CLSID {XXXXXXXX-XXXX-XXXX-XXXX-XXXXXXXXXXXX} failed due to the following error: 800703fa Illegal Operation attempted on a registry key that has been marked for deletion.

 

Additionally, the following warning event may be logged in the Application Log:

On a Windows Vista-based or Windows 7-based client computer, the following event may be logged in the Application log:

Log Name: Application
Source: Microsoft-Windows-User Profiles Service
Date: Date
Event ID: 1530
Task Category: None
Level: Warning
Keywords: Classic
User: SYSTEM
Computer: ComputerName

Description:
Windows detected your registry file is still in use by other applications or services. The file will be unloaded now. The applications or services that hold your registry file may not function properly afterwards.

DETAIL -
1 user registry handles leaked from \Registry\User\S-1-5-21-3112862306-1016156048-4130204762-1000: Process 932 (\Device\HarddiskVolume1\Windows\System32\w3wp.exe) has opened key \REGISTRY\USER\S-1-5-21-3112862306-1016156048-4130204762-1000

 

Cause:

The event warning explains that when the profile was being unloaded, the w3wp.exe process had a registry key handle to the profile hive for the user.

As per the kb947238 article, event 1530 occurs because Windows automatically closes any registry handle to a user profile that is left open by an application. This causes the error 800703fa.

 

Resolution:

Go to IIS Manager, select the Application Pool for your web application and click Advanced settings, change the value for "Load User Profile" to "true"

Setting this values makes the IIS loads the user profile for the application pool identity.

 

Reference Articles

https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/vijaysk/2009/03/08/iis-7-tip-3-you-can-now-load-the-user-profile-of-the-application-pool-identity/

blogs.msdn.com/b/distributedservices/archive/2009/11/06/a-com-server-application-may-stop-working-on-windows-server-2008.aspx

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/947238

blogs.msdn.com/b/dsnotes/archive/2014/03/25/more-on-user-profile-service-functionality.aspx

 

Thanks

Sakthivel Ramasamy 

MSFT