Last week I was in a bit of a panic when Excel Services and SQL Reporting Services (MOSS Integrated) broke on nearly all of my “demo” Hyper-V images.

I could publish to Excel Services, but attempting to render caused this exception to get thrown:

ProcessWebException: A Web exception during ExecuteWebMethod has occurred for server: http://atlasone:56737/SharedServices1/ExcelCalculationServer/ExcelService.asmx, method: OpenWorkbook, ex: System.Net.WebException: The underlying connection was closed: An unexpected error occurred on a receive. —> System.IO.IOException: Unable to read data from the transport connection: An existing connection was forcibly closed by the remote host. —> System.Net.Sockets.SocketException: An existing connection was forcibly closed by the remote host at System.Net.Sockets.Socket.Receive(Byte[] buffer, Int32 offset, Int32 size, SocketFlags socketFlags) at System.Net.Sockets.NetworkStream.Read(Byte[] buffer, Int32 offset, Int32 size)

All of these machines had worked flawlessly before, so I was flummoxed.

In addition, when I tried to render any SSRS MOSS Integrated reports…no joy:

Unable to read data from the transport connection: An existing connection was forcibly closed by the remote host

Interestingly enough, if I manually browsed to http://server/reportserver, I could run reports with no problems…just no luck via MOSS

I also noticed that all of the RSS feeds on my MOSS site had stopped working.

After doing a bit of back-tracking, I saw that all of these boxes had one thing in common: Windows Update had attempted to install security hotfix KB967723, and for reasons unknown, the process had failed. If there was no initial attempt to install KB967723, I had no problems…if WU tried to install it, my image was hosed.

Happy endings: By manually downloading and installing the hotfix and then bouncing the machine, all the broken stuff started functioning correctly. (The hotfix just happens to be network-related in nature, go figure)

Posting this in the hopes I can give someone back an afternoon of their lives!