Error, "File or assembly name Altiris.Profiling, or one of its dependencies, was not found"

Products

• IT Management Suite

Issue/Introduction

During a repair on the SMP 7.6 HF7, after a failed upgrade to 8.0 HF4, the following error stopped SIM (Symantec Installation Manager) during the services configuration process:

Could not load file or assembly 'Altiris.Profiling, Version=8.0.3396.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=d516cb311cfb6e4f' or one of its dependencies. The system cannot find the file specified. 

Similar error can be this one:

Uncaught Exception in Application

Could not load file or assembly 'Altiris.Interop, Version=8.0.2298.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=d516cb311cfb6e4f' or one of its dependencies. The system cannot find the file specified.

Environment

SMP 7.6 HF7
 

Cause

Previous upgrade failure left some assemblies references in the GAC for 8.0

Resolution

Usually this error can be fixed by running a repair on Altiris.Diagnostics_xxxx.msi for the current version:

msiexec /i "C:\Program Files\Altiris\Symantec Installation Manager\Installs\Altiris\altiris_diagnostics_x_x_x64.msi" skipaim=1

Sometimes repairing via MSI doesn't clear other GAC references for newer versions than the currently installed/repaired.

In this particular example, you need to go to C:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\assembly\GAC_MSIL\Altiris.Profiling and we find a folder called "v4.0_8.0.3396.0__d516cb311cfb6e4f". It most likely that it doesn't have "Altiris.Profiling.dll" file on it.
Since GacUtil.exe is not available without Visual Studio installed, we couldn't delete the 8.0 reference from GAC.

We decided to copy this dll from "v4.0_7.6.1655.14__d516cb311cfb6e4f" and place it in the 8.0 one.
That worked and the reconfiguration process worked and finished just fine.