Pesky annoyances when trying to modify DCOM Configurations got you down?

by Travis on Jan.24, 2009, under Tech Stuff

Now, when I say “pesky annoyance” I mean down right frustrating. Say your thumbnails won’t work on your xbox 360 when viewing items thrown out over media sharing and you’ve got this wonderful errors blasting around your event log:

Log Name:      System
Source:        Microsoft-Windows-DistributedCOM
Event ID:      10016
Description:
The machine-default permission settings do not grant Local Activation permission for the COM Server application with CLSID
{AB8902B4-09CA-4BB6-B78D-A8F59079A8D5}
to the user NT AUTHORITY\NETWORK SERVICE SID (S-1-5-20) from address LocalHost (Using LRPC). This security permission can be modified using the Component Services administrative tool.

Now, just think about how tech-savvy you really are. You know what’s up. You’re going to go find out what application this is by finding the AppID in the registry then head over to Component Services and go fix this up, right? You start “dcomcnfg” and you browse over to “Thumbnail Cache Out of Proc Server” and try to modify it… no love. Greyed out options and all you’ve just been denied by your trusty operating system. You know you’re and administrator but behold, you’ve been given the finger by Windows.

No worries.

Someone, somewhere decided that they would make a security consideration here and grant only “Trustedinstaller” full control permission instead of Administrators. How dare they huh? To fix this up, do the following:

    1. Open Registry Editor and browse over to ‘HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\CLASSES\AppID\{AB8902B4-09CA-4BB6-B78D-A8F59079A8D5}’
    2. Right click on the {AB8902B4-09CA-4BB6-B78D-A8F59079A8D5} key and choose “Permissions…”
    3. Just as you would a file, take ownership and assign it to ‘Administrators’ then go back and grant ‘Administrators’ the ‘full control’ permission.
    4. Restart dcomcnfg and modify away.

Once you’ve made your modifications and granted Local Activation permissions to NETWORK SERVICE, you should eliminate those errors.

This trick can be applied to ANY CLISD you can’t modify in Component Services DCOM Configuration. 🙂

2 Comments for this entry

Fulg
February 3rd, 2009 on 21:15
Awesome post, thanks for sharing!

I notice however that you cannot give back ownership to the original TrustedInstaller user (it is not selectable from the ownership list), but I suppose as long as it keeps the Full Control rights, there won’t be any side effects from the change.

Cheers!
Ben.
Travis
February 5th, 2009 on 14:10
Anytime. In all reality giving back that ownership isn’t really necessary. As long as it works and doesn’t allow “Everyone” to modify I think we’re all okay. LOL