The dreaded e00081d9 The Backup Exec job engine system service is not responding error

It's odd that every time I get backup exec 12.5 SP2 to a nice stable point something inevitably goes wrong. I suddenly started getting this error when the other half of my two backup jobs would run. I tried deleting/re-creating the jobs from policy, liveupdate, beutility- rebuild/repair/etc the db. Each time the backup job engine would puke and fail. Finally I gave up, made a copy of all the mdf and ldf files in the backup exec/data folder and uninstalled the program. And wiped out the whole backup exec folder for good measure. Then I re-installed it, liveupdated it, and then stopped the backup exec and sql services so I could re-swap out the mdf/ldf files. This restored all my jobs/policies/preferences/etc so I wouldn't have to start from scratch. But I still ran into the problem so I ran a manual backup job and it worked so I went ahead and deleted the whole Policy and selection list and made a new one from scratch.

After sleeping on it, it occurred to me that I had made one other change to one of the servers that gets backed up. This other server had died this week and since I only cared about the static files on it I had done a full rebuild of the server including upgrading the OS from 2k3 to 2k8 server. I kept the same name, folder names, etc and installed the beremote agent on it. In retrospect, I think after doing that I should have wiped out the .idr file that automatically gets generated at C:\Program Files\Symantec\Backup Exec\idr\Data. The more I think about it, the more likely it is that by changing the whole OS/setup of a previously snapped IDR box, I had confused the job engine to the point of failure. Of course, for now it's only a theory.