ISA Server cannot load the property page 0xc0040357 on export or backup

How to fix the following error on ISA 2004 backup or export:

ISA Server cannot load the property page.
Error: 0xc00403557
The Server referenced by Array [ArrayName] does not exist

A bit off topic for my usual blogging activities, but I had to share the resolution to this problem with you. I've had a busy time over the past few months changing things around on my home network and adding to it big-time. I've probably got enough infrasture now to support a medium size enterprise and an electricity bill to match, but it's also good way of learning by example and that's my excuse! While soaking up the lovely hot bank holiday weekend in the UK satisfied at finally resolving this issue with ISA combined with an hour or two lounging outside wirelessly working on more tweaks to the home network with a cold beer gave me the incentive to write this.

One of the first things I did in the re-org was to move my ISA server from one machine to another and build a new domain. My old ISA server was built on the RTM ISA 2004, and once working as I wanted, I exported the configuration to a safe backup location. As time moved on, I had upgraded that old machine to ISA 2004 SP1, but not altered anything significantly within the configuration. Once I was ready to bring the new server on-line, I figured it should be just a simple export from old and import to new. I failed, but wasn't that bothered as I had a relatively up to date configuration file, so used that and tweaked what needed changing to make the servers match. Whatever the error was then, I can't remember, but I strongly suspect it was the same error as above.

Remember also that the new server was also on a new domain, so I had to do further minor tweaking to resolve a few other issues. All sorted, or so I thought.

Recently, I've extensively changed my new ISA Servers configuration to support a stack of new functionality I need to expose on the Internet.  There's many a weeks worth of blog entries in what I've been up to.... However, to be safe, I wanted to make a backup of the latest configuration. However, I hit that error again 0xc00403557. No amount of MSN Searching, Googling, the Microsoft knowledgebase, searching sites such as isaserver.org or even the documentation (yes I did resort to that too) came up with a definitive answer. A few clues were alluded to, but nothing definite.

There were a couple of things I did spot "odd" in the configuration which I thought may have been causing the problem. Firstly, I have VPN access into my home network. Under the Virtual Private Networks configuration, on the VPN Clients Tab, Step 2 of the ISA configuration allows you to specify windows users (or select a RADIUS server). I have my network configured to work with AD, and saw a GUID rather than a specific windows group in here. This is probably because I'd moved the configuration file to another domain and (in my mind) seemed to tied up with a server referenced by the array not existing. I could have sworn I had previously fixed that, but I guess I must have missed it afterall. Oddly though, the VPN restricted configuration was working as expected. Bizarre, but I'll worry about that another day. Solving the GUID issue was easy to correct (simple remove old group, add new group).

However, still the export wouldn't complete giving the same error. Much head scratching and examining every option and dialog I could find in the ISA Server twenty times over finally came up with the actual cause, but certainly not from where I was expecting. I had an old report job defined in the configuration which was imported, probably originally created under ISA 2004 RTM. Simply deleting that fixed the problem. Section two of this readme.htm file here alludes to this.

So, if anyone from the ISA product group is reading this - please can we have a better error message here when you're working on SP2 [;)]  Thanks!!

Hope this saves someone hours of digging around otherwise.