A day after I performed a fresh install of Microsoft Exchange 2010, SP1 came out.  Great timing. I decided to plunge into it head first, feet second and safety third.

Received the following error during the SP1 installation:

Some controls aren’t valid. Setup previously failed while performing the action “Install”. You can’t resume setup by performaing the action “BuildToBuildUpgrade”.

It seems as though the server thinks a previous installation operation never completed. An interrupted setup never occurred on this system, but whatever, that’s what it thinks.

My setup is Windows Server 2008 R2, Exchange 2010. To resolve this error and continue installation open up your registry and go to

• Open regedit
• HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\ExchangeServer\v14\MailboxRole
• The role could potentially whichever role your server thinks installation was interrupted during
• Delete the key named Action

I’ve read posts that mention the existence of a value for the Watermark key is the issue, however my testing showed that deleting the Action key resolves the issue.  It is in fact what the error specifically states is the problem. Not sure if that logic can be applied universally however.

So I’m in the process of moving all the sites leftover on my old 32bit Windows Server 2003 web servers running IIS6. I’m moving everything to Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2 64bit.  I am pretty sure I’m going to end up choosing the Web Edition of Windows Server 2008.  So far it seems to do everything I need at a huge discount to Standard Edition.

I would have expected there to be no problems with most of them. I started out with a dinky little site that uses a small Microsoft Access Database.  This site uses a standard DSN to access the .mdb. I proceed to go to the Administrative Tools and open the ODBC Data Source Administrator window and add a new DSN for the .mdb and lo and behold I see the following nearly empty window:

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