DPM Error 307: Manually Uninstalling Microsoft System Center DPM Protection Agent

When installing an Protection Agent from DPM 2007 on a server on a Windows 2003 Domain I ran into a wacky problem.

A server errored out with a 307 error.

The protection agent operation failed because DPM detected an unknown DPM protection agent on MYSERVER.

The Microsoft Documentation says that the recommended action is to:

Use Add or Remove Programs in Control Panel to uninstall the protection agent from MYSERVER, then reinstall the protection agent and perform the operation again.

So I log into the server to remove the program using Add/Remove Programs, however the Add/Remove Programs listing is completely blank. I do a bunch of research on this and eventually I determine that the Uninstall information must somehow be corrupt, the system needs a OS restore or something. I cant afford this and will plan to do this another day. In the mean time I need to get this program uninstalled so I can reinstall the DPM Agent on this server.

I couldn’t find an MSI or anything to use to uninstall it but I found a post describing where in the registry to find uninstall program locations is for certain programs.

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESOFTWAREMicrosoftWindowCurrentVersionUninstall

Well, there is supposed to be an entry here for each of the programs that are installed on your system, but there was not one for the DPM agent, I did find all sorts of UID type entries and I looked through them and low and behold, I found an entry for Microsoft System Center DPM Protection Agent (the name of the agent was in the ‘DisplayName’ string key) I then copied the string in the ‘UninstallString’ key

MsiExec.exe /I{D58FCD22-5818-412B-93C3-D03CF3D6A2CE}
Note: do not run this on your system, the UID above should correspond to your system

pasted it into a command prompt window and it then ran the uninstall program for “Microsoft System Center DPM Protection Agent” and prompted for a reboot.

I rebooted and the system came back up, out of curiosity I went back into the registry and I could not find the entry in the registry any more. I am not going to do more investigation into at this point however it makes me think that the items that show in this registry folder with a UID instead of a program name are somehow corrupted even though this one ran okay. I looked on my windows XP workstation (which Add/Remove Programs works on) and I have dozens of UID entries in this registry area so I am sure that this is not the cause of the “corrupted” Add/Remove programs issue.

Anyway, thats it, the “corrupt” DPM protection agent was removed and so I was able to rerun the install process from the DPM 2007 Administrator Console again. It succeeded without issue and now I can backup my server.