Help&Support and Msinfo32 non functional

Devin McCloud

Although this is not related to this forums subject entirely, I thought I would pass on some info to save other who are studying for the 70-290 test. Today as I was studying, one of the challenges was to send remote assistant files to another pc on the domain. I was road blocked by the fact that in my domain,on my win 2003 server, I was unable to run MSinfo32 or Help & support. Even though the service was started and functioning , it would hourglass for a second and then nothing! After wasting nearly 6 hours combing the web (with no help from searches on Microsoft's site) I was able to fix this problem. It seems this is an issue with updating to SP2 service packs on some machines.


1. Open a command prompt.
2. Navigate to %windir%\PCHealth\HelpCtr\Binaries
3. Run this command:

start /w helpsvc /svchost netsvcs /regserver /install
4. Once this command completes the Help and Support service should now appear in services.msc
5. Start the Help and Support service

Now Help and Support work, Msinfo32 works and Remote Assistant Invitations work when clicked!\
Hope I saved some people some time.

mrmcmint

Thanks for the heads up!