Friday came and went without having solved the all-too-familiar “Failed to retrieve schema” error when creating the FIM MA for the first time, and having exhausted all the usual remedies, even resorting to complete uninstall/reinstall, my colleague Ryan and I admitted defeat and hoped that we’d figure something out over the weekend.

In a quiet moment on a Sunday afternoon I came across this TechNet article, and decided to follow this up first thing Monday morning. When I did, I found that Ryan had found the same article and beaten me to it :).

The reason I’m posting about this is that you will invariably run into this exact problem when you do a vanilla install, and run all your windows updates (including ,Net 4 together with FIM hotfix rollup #2). I think that if we had created the FIM MA before we applied the hotfix, we would have put 2 and 2 together! When you do the same thing, I hope you find this post and realize the cause quicker than we did!  Just when you start to feel confident that you’ve seen everything, don’t be lulled into a false sense of security … you can trust a hotfix to invariably pull the rug out from under you 😦