The Inquisitive Coder – Davy Brion's Blog

Just when i thought i had experienced more than a lifetime’s worth of MSDTC issues, i ran into another one. All of a sudden, my MSDTC transactions started causing problems on my system again. Now, this happens occasionaly for reasons that i’ve been unable to figure out. I’ve learned to just accept it, reboot my system when it happens, and once it’s back up it all just works again. So this time, i rebooted my system, waited for it come back up, tried running the same code that failed before and much to my surprise i got the same exception as i had gotten before:

System.Transactions.TransactionManagerCommunicationException: Communication with the underlying transaction manager has failed. —> System.Runtime.InteropServices.COMException: The MSDTC transaction manager was unable to push the transaction to the destination transaction manager due to communication problems. Possible causes are: a firewall is present and it doesn’t have an exception for the MSDTC process, the two machines cannot find each other by their NetBIOS names, or the support for network transactions is not enabled for one of the two transaction managers.

I checked my MSDTC security settings to make sure that everything was still configured correctly, and it was. I then checked to see if Windows Firewall is still disabled, and it was. Then i remembered that i’ve had problems with MSDTC transactions failing after Microsoft Security Essentials (MSE) had installed updates. Again, when that happens i typically just reboot and everything works again.  Just for the hell of it, i turned off MSE’s real-time protection and tried again.  And it worked without problems. I turned the real-time protection back on to see if it would fail again but it kept working. I have no idea what the problem is, but at least i’m now armed with yet another thing to try when MSDTC stops working on my machine.  Gotta love options!

Seriously though, with all the problems i (and others) have run into with using MSDTC, i’m starting to wonder if Microsoft has some kind of covert Make-MSDTC-Usage-As-Painful-As-Possible mission going on somewhere…  Then again, maybe their QA is just getting even worse than it already was.  Oh well…