PSA: NAV2009 – Use SETUP.EXE

This is for folks that install Microsoft Dynamics NAV components. I have not confirmed for certain if this is still necessary in 2009 R2, but I’ve seen this multiple times on 2009 and 2009 SP1.

If you ever intend to use any SMTP related functionality, such as the NAV Approvals system or the Serenic Navigator Email Notification Features, it is critical you install NAV from the setup.exe file in the root of the installation CD. You can directly access installers for all of the various functionality (Classic client, Service Tier, etc), but you should not. If you do, when the RTC tries to access the SMTP related DLL, you’ll get this charming error:

This message is for C/AL programmers: Unable to create an instance of Automation Server System._ComObject with CLSID = f9dae2a4-d2f8-37c3-86d5-e4ffe166d860 Retrieving the COM class factory for component with CLSID {F9DAE2A4-D2F8-37C3-86D5-E4FFE166D860} failed due to the following error 800703f..

I had a support incident with Microsoft on this last year – we checked registry keys, we hacked into the core of the system in ways that terrify me to this day. In the end, we uninstalled the entire Microsoft Dynamics NAV stack from the service tier machine and re-installed using SETUP.EXE. It was fine thereafter.

So, please, make sure you use the correctly provided installer.