Error 126: The specified module could not be found
Today was a weird one...
Nothing changed on the server but the following services were stopped and could not be started:
Simple Mail Transport Protocol SMTP
FTP Publishing Service
Microsoft Exchange IMAP4
Microsoft Exchange POP3
When we tried to start any of the above services, the error was the same: Error 126: The specified module could not be found. This was a great time to break out Filemon from www.sysinternals.com. We downloaded and extracted filemon. I know that SMTP for example (all of the services above do, but using SMTP as an example) run under the inetinfo.exe process. I set filemon to only capture accesses by inetinfo.exe and the first few lines were "not found" searching for ISATQ.DLL. So I went a step further...I set filemon to filter on ISATQ.DLL and tried to start SMTP. Same results, not found. I then tried to start FTP Publishing, same thing for ISATQ.DLL, not found. I then checked my reference box and it should live in c:\windows\system32\inetsrv. It was present on my test box and not present on the "problem machine". We then did a quick search for the file on the problem machine and it was present in c:\windows\system32\dllcache. We copied it from the dllcache directory to the windows\system32\inetsrv directory and...poof...all the services started successfully.
btw, ISATQ.DLL is an IIS file for "Asynchronous Thread Queue".
Cheers!
Petergal
