Yesterday we bumped into a issue with one of our customers.
On a Fax Server, the GFI Fax service would not start with error 9998. The service was starting as Domain Administrator and the first thought was to check the credentials of the service.
After this did not work, we also noticed that several other services had problems starting (such as Filezilla FTP and some windows services after a restart).
Eventually, the simple solution to this problem was to delete a file named “Programs” (no extension) on the c:\ (root) drive of the windows installation.
The company we are supporting has an in-house NOC team. As the FAX service that they have manages a PCI card with 8 modems and sometimes some of the lines get stuck, the NOC team was informed by their customers that there is a problem with the line (around twice a month) and we decided to create a scheduled task to perform every Saturday a gradual restart of the FAX Service so that all modems are re-initialized.
Unfortunately, during the tests our customer’s NOC was performing in order to create the script that would gradually restart the service and notify for its success or failure made a mistake and exported the results to c:\Programs (most probably a “” was missing somewhere on the script”.
This caused severe issues with the ability of the windows service manager to locate the correct paths for several executable files starting services within the Program Files directory.
