Microsoft Membership Agent May Not Start (171331)

SYMPTOMS

Microsoft Membership Agent may not start and may return the following error messages in the Event Viewer logs.

In the system log you will get the following error message:

Event ID: 7023
Source: Sevice Control Manager
Description: The Membership Agent service terminated with the following error:
The service has not been started.

In the application log you will get the following error messages:

Event ID: 4123
Source: Sicily
Description: Initializing buffers and connection to Membership Backend SQL Server failed.

Event ID: 12297
Source: AccessCtl
Description: Cannot update the plans list.

If you started the Membership Agent from the command prompt, you will also get the following error message:

The service terminated with the service specific error message:
Could not start Membership Agent service on <server name> error 1062.

CAUSE

The problem occurs because the group_limited_access_plan is in a state in which the count of the entries in group_limited_access_plan does not match the number of rows returned by the query:

   "select t.c_group_description, p.i_group_id, i_account_id, i_owner_id
   from group_limited_access_plan p, group_type t
   where p.i_group_id = t.i_group_id order by p.i_group_id ".

This situation should never occur through the use of the administrative tools that ship with Microsoft Membership Server.

RESOLUTION

To resolve this problem, make the following changes to the stored procedure "sp_enum_access_plans":

Change

   "select count(*) from group_limited_access_plan"

   "select count(*) from group_limited_access_plan p, group_type t
   where p.i_group_id = t.i_group_id"