Various Services Won’t Start

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My company recently installed Microsoft Internet Security and Acceleration (ISA) Server 2000 on a Windows 2000 server with Service Pack 2 (SP2). The installation went fine, but afterward some ISA Server services wouldn't start. We rebooted the server and received an alert that some services wouldn't start. When we checked NT Event Viewer, we found several system events that stated is not a valid Win32 application.... Not only was ISA Server having problems, so were several other services. We searched some newsgroups and formed the hypothesis that long filenames had somehow been disabled on the computer.

In an attempt to fix the problem, we opened a registry editor (regedit.exe) and navigated to the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESYSTEMCurrentControlSetServices registry subkey. This subkey contains information related to all Win2K services. We found the ISA Server subkeys and saw that the ImagePath values contain long filenames. We added quotation marks to the beginning and end of each ImagePath value. After we rebooted the server, all the ISA Server services started. We repeated this process for the other services that had been causing problems, and they subsequently all started as well.

We later discovered that the likely cause of the problem was that the registry subkey that enables long filenames was set incorrectly. We started regedit and navigated to the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESYSTEMCurrentControlSetControlFileSystemWin31FileSys-tem registry subkey. If the parameter Win31FileSystem is set to 0, long filenames are supported on FAT32 file systems. If this parameter is set to 1, long filenames aren't supported—only DOS 8.3 names are supported. We set Win31FileSystem back to 0 and rebooted the machine. All the services, including ISA Server, then started.

—Peter Wong
[email protected]