Having spent lots of time googling and going down various blind alleys, trying to fix an error on our live site servers where trying to run a DTS, looking at user properties and various other things all threw up a pretty uninformative error related to being unable to find xpstar.dll. Having sorted it I thought I'd post what worked for me in case it saves anyone else from too much time-wasting.
The root of the problem was the virus and trojan s***storm that hit us a few weeks back, but once that was remedied the SQL Server 2000 issues remained.
Lesson one
For a while I was looking on the wrong server, coz I assumed that the server running the DTS would be requiring its own copy, but turns out that the server it was targetting was the one lacking xpstar. Don't forget to check the other server!
Lesson two
Plopping a new copy of it into the relevant place didn't help. Perhaps it needed re-registering in some way. A couple of threads in Googledom talked about MDAC, and reinstalling it seemed like a good idea, but fooling round looking for Windows Components to reinstall led nowhere.
Lesson three
One of those threads mentioned reinstalling SP4. Fortunately we had copies of the installation media for both SP4 and SQL Server 2000 on the server, but first time we ran the SP4 install it transpired that the virus had actually messed with about with these too, deleting a crucial directory (Binn), not within the SP4 media but the SQL installation media. Once this was sorted out, an SP4 reinstallation was all that was required. It fixed the xpstar error without a restart.
Lesson four
Don't know if there is a lesson four, but if it turns out that we didn't get the virus off properly, or I should have done a restart after all, I'll let you know.
HTH Jeremy
Postscript
January 2010: we had more problems which in part were related to, you guessed it, xpstar.dll "disappearing". All the SQL Server jobs disappeared, for one. Reapplying SP4 once more did the trick: turned out the jobs were just hiding when the server "lost" xpstar. I need to get to the bottom of why it happened a second time, but there you go: SP4 fix definitely works for us.
About Me
- Jeremy
- Web person at the Imperial War Museum, just completed PhD about digital sustainability in museums (the original motivation for this blog was as my research diary). Posting occasionally, and usually museum tech stuff but prone to stray. I welcome comments if you want to take anything further. These are my opinions and should not be attributed to my employer or anyone else (unless they thought of them too). Twitter: @jottevanger
2 comments:
Having the same problem here, but unfortunately reinstalling SQL Server 2000 service pack 4 hasn't solved the issue, even after restarting the SQL service. We've tried this on both machines, and this does nothing to help the problem at all!
Sorry to hear that and I wish I could help. What I would say is, as and when you get an answer it would be great if you could post it here because there is a stready stream of people like you and me who arrive at this page looking for an answer to the same problem, so your solution could really help them.
I wish you the very best of luck!
Post a Comment