Management Reporter 2012 Process Service Not Running

I was out on site a short time ago implementing Management Reporter 2012 for a client and ran into a problem with Management Reporter. I could log into Management Reporter, create reports and everything was fine; but I could not generate a report.

When I was investigating the problem I opened the Configuration Console and found that the Management Reporter 2012 Process Service was not running;

When I tried to start it, I got an error message stating the operation could not be completed;

Management Reporter – The operation could not be completed because doing so would create a bad reference.

I did some of the usual investigation, stopping and starting services, resetting passwords and so on to no effect. As it was a brand new implementation of Management Reporter with no reports in it, I decided not to spend any longer investigating and trying to diagnose the cause of the problem.

Instead I took the option of taking off and nuking it from orbit (guess which movie I’ve watched recently); I uninstalled and reinstalled Management Reporter. After completing the reinstall I checked the services and both were running fine.

I don’t know what the cause of the initial problem was so if anyone has seen and resolved this problem without a re-install, I’d appreciate it if you could let me know what you found.