One of our Windows 2000 Terminal Servers keeps running low in disk space due in part to a proliferation of SHADOWnnnn (where nnnn is a four digit number) folders in the folder \WINNT\Microsoft .NET\Framework\v1.1.4322

The folders all appear to contain the same 10 files, each using around 8 MB of disk space which in itself is not a lot but there were over 50 of these folders when I checked.

The files are:

• _aspnet_isapi.dll
• _CORPerfMonExt.dll
• _fusion.dll
• _mscorjit.dll
• _mscorlib.dll
• _mscorsn.dll
• _mscorsvr.dll
• _mscorwks.dll
• _msvcr71.dll
• _PerfCounter.dll

We have another Windows 2000 Terminal Server and this only contains 1 SHADOWnnnn folder which tells me that problem is something to do with this server in particular rather than some generic issue.

There does appear to be one clue as the date and time stamps for all the SHADOW folders on this particular machine read 02:00 in the morning of every day (03:00 since the clocks went back), however there are no event logs near these time to help identify what is going on. Looking through the system I identified Automatic Updates were scheduled for the new time of 3:00 in the morning so off we went to the Windows Update Log in \WinNT\WindowsUpdate.log which identified a potential problem:

2008-10-27    03:00:12:531     836    430    Agent    WARNING: LoadLibrary failed for srclient.dll with hr:8007007e
2008-10-27    03:00:15:062    2636    388    Misc    ===========  Logging initialized (build: 7.2.6001.784, tz: -0000)  ===========
2008-10-27    03:00:15:062    2636    388    Misc      = Process: C:\WINNT\system32\wuauclt.exe
2008-10-27    03:00:15:062    2636    388    Misc      = Module: C:\WINNT\system32\wuaueng.dll

The failing line describes "LoadLibrary failed for srclient.dll with hr:8007007e" and this led to a particular Microsoft Article Windows XP stops responding when you download updates from Windows Update. Manually running Microsoft Update confirmed the problem area by failing to install the .NET related updates.

The next step was to run through the recommend steps in turn (typing the following commands into the command prompt) however these did not resolve my particular problem.

• regsvr32 /i Urlmon.dll
• regsvr32 /i Shdocvw.dll
• regsvr32 Msjava.dll
• regsvr32 Actxprxy.dll
• regsvr32 Oleaut32.dll
• regsvr32 /i Mshtml.dll
• regsvr32 /i Browseui.dll
• regsvr32 /i Shell32.dll

The next step was to download and re-install the Microsoft .NET Framework 1.1 Redistributable Package. Initially the installation complained about a missing netfx.msi file but it was looking in the wrong place, I had to re-point the installer to \WinNT\msdownld.tmp\IXP000.TMP however still no dice. Even re-installing using msiexec /x netfx.msi failed.

Next up was to try the .NET Framework Setup Cleanup Utility from Aaron Stebner’s WebLog. This did require a reboot and after the server came up it allowed me to re-install Net Framework 1.1 and a further reboot later the patches installed successfully. The existing SHADOW folders have been deleted and it looks like they are no longer building up.