Marked for reinstallation, it will not be started at this time

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A few weeks ago my customer hit a situation where their clients were failing to communicate with their primary System Center 2012 Configuration Manager (SCCM/CONFIGMGR) site.  The solution was simple, but the troubleshooting to figure it out wasn't such an easy thing so I wanted to share in hopes that it helps others in the future.

One thing we keyed in on was that newly built machines were showing this in the ClientIDManager.log:

  • [RegTask] - Client registration is pending. Sending confirmation request for GUID:A548086E-FF92-4BB9-84A5-FE32C824A391 …

Looking through the system status and then at the smsexec.log on the Management Point (MP) showed us lines like this:

  • INFO: thread component SMS_MP_FILE_DISPATCH_MANAGER is marked for reinstallation, it will not be started at this time

We would see this for multiple components.  The system seemed to have the components marked to be reinstalled, but was failing to actually attempt a reinstall.  This was happening on multiple MP, but not all.  We wanted to "unmark" the components so they would get started correctly and traced it down to HKLM\software\Microsoft\sms\Operations Management\component.  Under here there are keys for individual components, like HKLM\software\Microsoft\sms\Operations Management\components\sms_mp_filedispatch_manager.  Comparing the broken MP to known good MP we noticed that the "Install State" was 3 on good machines but 4 on the bad MP.  We stopped the CONFIGMGR services on the MP and changed it to a 3 for the problem services that the log reported, then started up the services again.  Things had to go through their cycles but then did start up and work correctly after that.

We didn't dig into why this occurred, or possible side effects, but after a few weeks we haven't seen any problems.  The cause may have been a side effect of a failed upgrade, that has since gone through just fine as well.