"Faulting application AeXNSAgent.exe" error starting an Altiris Agent on a Windows Vista system

Products

• IT Management Suite

Issue/Introduction

The Altiris Agent is not starting on a 32-bit Vista client. The Windows Event logs show the following error:

Faulting application AeXNSAgent.exe, version 6.0.0.2386 (also 7.0.0.3356), time stamp 0x4609beb9, faulting module ntdll.dll, version 6.0.6000.16386 (also 6.0.6001.18000), time stamp 0x4549bdc9, exception code 0xc0000374, fault offset 0x000af1c9, process id 0x1230, application start time 0x01c84ef2d1e04622.

In the Altiris Agent logs, most of the processes started correctly with Severity 4 messages, although the last message that appears is:

Launch client UI failed: The remote procedure call failed. (-2147023170)

Cause

The error messages point to a problem with Windows starting the services. The customer had just rolled out some recent Vista Microsoft Updates to his workstation and rebooted it.  It's possible one of the sub-Agents on the client machine was not the most recent version, although we didn't confirm this.

Resolution

In troubleshooting, we removed the sub-Agents from the system using:

C:\Program Files\Altiris\Altiris Agent\AeXAgentUtil.exe /UninstallAgents

After doing this, the Altiris Agent service was able to be started successfully. It checked in to the Notification Server, downloaded its subagents again, and could be restarted as needed, although when it was restarted, the Application Event logs showed a similar error which did not prevent the service from starting:

Faulting application AeXAgentUIHost.exe, version 6.0.0.2386, time stamp 0x4609be01, faulting module ole32.dll, version 6.0.6000.16386, time stamp 0x4549bd92, exception code 0xc0000005, fault offset 0x0004101f, process id 0xbb4, application start time 0x01c84ef7f08d3fb2. (Did not see this error with NS 7.0)

The client computer was rebooted and the agent would successfully start up with no more errors showing up in the logs.

Applies To
Notification Server 6.0.6074 (SP3 R6)
Windows 2003 Server SP2
SQL Server 2000 (off box)
Client: 32-bit Windows Vista

Note: Have also found this same problem with NS 7.0.