Servermanager.exe this application could not be started

T

tomerr

This was supposed to be a question but i have figured it out, and since I couldn't find anything about the problem anywhere and i can't report it to MS as a bug, I'm posting this for anyone who runs into this sort of problem.

I have recently been starting to get the following error when trying to launch servermanager.exe :
897952.png

All Users seemed to be affected and it wasn't a permissions issue.
This did not happen right out of the box but after installing a 3rd party server software of some sort.
once I ran procmon to see what It does or does not do excatly, i saw many references to the Syswow64 folder, so i decided to copy both Servermanager.exe and servermanagerlauncher.exe into syswow64.
Once i did that it started working again.

A hunch led me to check the enable64bit parameter on the registry and i found that the 3rd party app installer had configured that parameter to false (0) which means forcing .net to work in 32bit mode globally.
897953.png
Comparing this to a clean install I discovered that out of the box this parameter is set to true (1) - obviously.

So apparently Servermanager.exe cannot run if this parameter's value is set to false, but you can workaround/fix it by copying the file into the Syswow64 folder.
there's no need to change the shortcut which points to its original location under system32 folder. it'll work anyway.

I hope it saves someone the time and frustration.
Tomer

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