The Microsoft IT Site Delete Capture Feature 1.0 that wouldn't die

So merely a day after the marathon weekend of getting my MSSX 2008 (wss 3.0 sp2) instance up to Sharepoint 2010 Server, an old add-on came back to haunt me. The Microsoft IT Site Delete Capture Feature 1.0 (MS.IT.SiteDeleteCapture) whose installation was long ago lost in a fiery server crash and whose features had long been disabled. Additionally, the install files for it have long disappeared from the face of the earth as all the links to it are dead. http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc706867%28office.12%29.aspx (Thanks codeplex for ditching the old junk! LOL). What really makes it great is that it never came up as an issue in the preupgradecheck report.

Anyway I had a user report that they couldn't delete a subsite. Lo and behold the user was right. I used the trusty ULS viewer to decode the wonderfully cryptic Microsoft Correlation ID and discovered the culprit.



It is experiences like these that have converted me over to the philosophy of NEVER installing any third party addons to a sharepoint/wss/mssx install that didn't come out of the DVD or from the Microsoft update site. Or at the very least, plan on leaving there long before the next major upgrade.

So I ran my old favorite utility: http://featureadmin.codeplex.com/ (awesome utility btw). But it didn't show up there. I tried a few more tools and came to the conclusion that as far as sharepoint was concerned, it wasn't installed which meant that I had some phantom Event Hook of some type lingering around. At this point my two remaining choices were A) Open up a Microsoft PSS ticket or B) Roll the dice and try something crafty and stupid.

My plan B was to just plop on the newer version of the IT site capture following the age old wisdom of the best way to cure a hangover (more alcohol btw if you missed the reference). I found it at the redirected link for the old product under the new auspicious title of Sharepoint Governance. My theory was that it was the successor to the old product, and it would probably Event hook in a similar way, that it was worth a shot. Worst case scenario it would just be one more thing for them to fix for me if I wound up with PSS.

Cue the drum roll....



And we're back in business. And yes, as a sanity check I did check and see to make sure the site was gone and I also created a new site and deleted it as well. So far so good!