After installing the October 2003 VS.NET documentation update (found
here: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=a3334aed-
4803-4495-8817-c8637ae902dc&displaylang=en ) I can no longer access help
from within VS.NET 2003.

If I select "Contents" from the Help menu I get a dialog that says:

"Help Update in Progress"

"Help is updating to reflect your recent changes. This may take several
minutes."

After chugging away for several minutes it chokes and I get a message
that says "Server Execution Failed".

The following error appears in the Event Viewer (System):

Event ID: 10010
Source: DCOM
Description: The server {4A79114D-19E4-11D3-B86B-00C04F79F802} did not
register with DCOM within the required timeout.

That CLSID corresponds to dexplore.exe.

Other details:

I can run the help throught the Start Menu no problem. It's only when I
try to invoke it from the IDE (either through the Help Menu or via the F1
key).

Also, I've configured the VS.NET IDE to run help in its own window rather
than inside the IDE.

It ran fine just prior to installing the update.

Thanks for any help,

Ok, despite screwing around with this for several days (uninstalling,
reinstalling, copying installation CDs to local hard drive, etc.) I managed
to solve the problem an hour after posting for help in public. Isn't that
always the way?

I was looking around for some sort of output log to see if I could find out
any more details and I went to the folder where dexplore.exe is stored. I
found no log files there but for the hell of it I double-clicked on
dexplore.exe expecting it to start up just like it does when starting it
from the shortcut in the Start Menu. Not so. This time it gave me the
"Help Update in Progress" dialog (which it never did when starting from the
Start Menu) and rather than choking it finished the process and opened the
help browser. Now I can invoke it from VS.NET without any problems.

I noticed that the Start Menu shortcut has the parameter "/helpcol" tacked
on. I couldn't find out what that does but it seems to prevent the help
update process.

I'm guessing that I was hitting a timeout period. Whenever I invoked help
from the IDE through DCOM it never waited long enought for the update
process to finish. Running dexplore.exe by itself gave the program plenty
of time to update.

Anyway, it's working fine now. Hopefully this will help someone else.