WSUS Service fails to start with error 193, WSUS Service is not a valid Win32 application

As I continue to build my System Center Configuration Manager 2012 (CM12) lab I continue to shoot myself in the foot in a number of ways.  Over the weekend I discovered that my WSUS service was unable to start and was logging “WSUS Service is not a valid Win32 application” in the event log.

After some digging around I found this great post by David Obrien (and great Config Manager blog by the way) that points to the issue: https://www.david-obrien.net/2012/09/18/re-adding-pxe-support-to-configuration-manager-site/

Essentially a file had been created called c:\program and it was stopping the service from starting and renaming it worked a charm.  I’ll have to dig around a little more to work out what really happened here down the line. But thanks David!