Whilst working on a new site this weekend I almost lost it:

Trying to open Add Remove Program (or run appwiz.cpl) results in:

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Parser Message
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Value creation failed ” at line 451
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OK
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So after many hours of Googling, here’s the fix:

SOLUTION:
copy shellstyle.dll to system32

I located the file shellstyle.dll on a known working system.

The error was experience on an SBS 2003 R2 (Premium edition) server.

Problem could be related to custom OS installation disc created by NLite – but more on that later.