This is more for personal reference, but also just in case anyone else sees the error from the event log below. This appears to be a catch all exception for a variety of different problems that might occur in a .NET app running on Server 2003. The application in question is a .NET 3.5 application, and would just not start when copied to 2003. The running exe would disappear from Taskman and be replaced by DW20.exe (Dr. Watson), which would place the following error into the event log.
Event Type: Error
Event Source: .NET Runtime 2.0 Error Reporting
Event Category: None
Event ID: 5000
Date: 6/17/2008
Time: 7:43:36 AM
User: N/A
Computer: PATS
Description:
EventType clr20r3, P1 pats.exe, P2 1.0.0.0, P3 48585526, P4 infrastructure.library, P5 1.0.0.0, P6 4856e351, P7 54, P8 3b, P9 lekhqnpdiyzpb1zxlxqlmnyaxftzwyry, P10 NIL.
A few things to remember when seeing this:
- Ensure all related DLLs are either in the GAC or bin directory of the given application. This can happen when there is a failure to load a DLL. You can use Filemon to see if there are any file not found errors during start. In my case I had some DLLs from Infragistics that weren't being copied to the bin directory.
- Reboot after installing .NET 3.5. If you are starting on a clean image or PC, I have seen this issue crop up if there hasn't been a reboot on the machine after the installation of the .NET Framework. Note that 3.5 installs 2.0 SP1 and 3.0 SP1 at the same time it installs itself.
- Finally the error specific to my case, is the wrong database server was setup in the connection string in the app.config. Why this caused a generic error like this rather than an exception I'm not 100% sure. But check the connection string if there's data being loaded on startup.