ESM with IE7 Unable to Open the Help File

[Today's tip comes to us from Mark Stanfill.]

There is a fairly innocuous, but annoying issue with Exchange System Manager (ESM) on servers that you have installed IE7 on.  When you click on help in ESM (and only ESM has this issue), and click on one of the help items in the drop-down menu, you receive a Dr. Watson crash message like the following (click on image for full size):

 

 

The text of the error will be something similar to:

AppName: exadmin.dll AppVer: 6.5.7638.1 AppStamp:430e730e
ModName: unknown ModVer: 0.0.0.0 ModStamp:00000000
fDebug: 0 Offset: 0003bdc8

If you're seeing this, first let me commend you on actually trying to read the help file :)  You can still open the help files directly by navigating to %programfiles%\exchsrvr\bin  and double-clicking on chm files.

The crash occurs because of a file (PSAPI.dll) that is updated in IE7, but also exists in system32.  To fix this issue, the older version in exchsrvr\bin can be safely renamed.  To do this, use these steps:

1) Stop All Exchange and IIS services by stopping the Exchange System Attendant Service and the IIS Admin Service from the Service Control Manager (services.msc).

2) Rename the PSAPI.DLL in the %programfiles%\exchsrvr\bin directory to PSAPI.DLL.OLD

3) Restart all Exchange and IIS services