Repairing SCCM Client WMI issues.

Occasionally clients will develop a problem with their WMI which impacts the operations of the SCCM client.  For example Application Deployment Evaluation Cycle will not respond or trigger the check / update.

The giveaway is a sea of red in the DcmWmiProvider.log with errors such as

Not found (Error: 80041002; Source: WMI)

At this point you can deduce that your WMI information is corrupted and needs to be rebuilt.

Another symptom is the inability of the SMS Agent Host (ccmexec) service to stop in a timely way.  It will try but then hang in a pending stop state.  This is annoying since this needs to be stopped before the Windows Management Instrumentation (Winmgmt) service can be stopped.

You may need to force the ccmexec service stop to proceed.

To do that,

sc queryex ccmexec

this output the process ID (PID) reference.  Force it down with

taskkill /f /PID <PidReference>

Personally I find it easier to manage the services in the services.msc applet.

Stop the Windows Management Instrumentation (Winmgmt) service.  This is not that easy to do because it will restart immediately.  It may need disabling for a short period while folder operation is done.

delete or rename the C:\Windows\System32\Wbem\Repository folder

Then restart the the Winmgmt service and the ccmexec service.

At this point you have caused chaos because, well, there's no WMI data at all ! :)

The SCCM Client will freak and run a repair operation to try and right itself while writing a log called repair-msi-<GUIDstring>.log It may get a 1603 error in which case it may retry until it gets a 0.  I've seen 1603 on the first attempt and 0 on the second.

After that the SCCM client tries to rebuild its world and get all its apps assignment polices - slowly.  On the machine this process occurred on it was about 3 hours with an end of day shutdown and a start of day boot up, and a forced restart on the ccmexec service.  Eventually normal service was resumed and the apps it was supposed to apply, did so.