IIS-W3SVC-PerfCouters error followed by AtrsHost Service Restarting. Cannot write configuration file applicationHost.config

Products

• Client Management Suite
• IT Management Suite

Issue/Introduction

Inspecting Event Viewer you notice errors related to IIS-W3SVC-PerfCouters followed by entries for the AtrsHost service. 

Reviewing services you notice the World Wide Web Publishing service shows as "Stopping" and never completely stops.

Upon further investigation you notice in the Symantec Management Agent logs on the task server the following entry:

Task Server failed to complete registration. Will be retried in 120 seconds.
Filename: \\?\C:\Windows\system32\inetsrv\config\applicationHost.config
Error: Cannot write configuration file

You decide to check the applicationHost.config file located in C:\Windows\system32\inetsrv\config\ and notice that it's larger than expected.  In this circumstance 27 MB.  Typically this file is a few KB in size.  You then make a copy of the file and copy it to the desktop of your server so that you can inspect it in Notepad.  If you then navigate down to the section <location path="Default Web Site/Altiris/ClientTaskServer">, find the section that starts with <providers> you will notice something like this:

<clear />
<add value="Negotiate" />
<add value="NTLM" />
<clear />

You may notice many duplicates of this entry.

Environment

ITMS 8.7.1, 8.7.2

Cause

Known issue

Resolution

This issue has been fixed with our ITMS 8.7.3. See Release Notes: Fixed Issues

For those with ITMS 8.7.2 release, please refer to the following KB article for the available pointfix:

KB 366939 "CUMULATIVE POST ITMS 8.7.2 POINT FIXES"