Last month when Microsoft released KB 974571 it caused many installations of LCS and OCS issues whereby after the server rebooted, key services would not start. Upon investigating the reason you would see errors in the event log about the evaluation period expiring:
“The evaluation period for Microsoft Office Live Communication Server 2005 has expired. Obtain the released version of this product and upgrade to the non-evaluation version by running setup.exe.”
The only way out of this predicament was to uninstall KB974571 (Many thanks to Dave Howe at Microsoft PSS for pointing this out)
Microsoft has updated the KB with a patch you can install previous to KB974571 that will correct the issue and allow you to install this important patch. It is still recommended you apply this KB. The updated KB is located here: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/974571
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