Adminpak on Vista RTM

Wow it has been a long time since I've posted anything.  I have been heads down getting my customers ready to deploy Vista in their environments.  There was so much information to keep track of on what we could and could not share, I just decided to keep quiet until everything had been made public.  Well now that we have RTM'd Vista I am free to talk! 

So one of the most challenging items for my customers during the Vista Beta was running the Windows 2003 Administration tools on Windows Vista.  There were many "hacks" out there that seemed to work by modifying the MSI using Orca or another tool, however with Vista RTM our story is much better.

Vista RTM includes an application compatibility shim that will allow the Windows 2003 Admin Tools (Adminpak) to install on Vista!  This requires no modification of the MSI.

One thing to note after testing is that Active Directory snap-ins do not seem function immediately after the install.  However, this is easily rectified by registering the following DLL's.  , ADprop.dll and DSadmin.dll  So once you install the Adminpak go to a command prompt and type

regsvr32 adprop.dll

and

regsvr32 dsadmin.dll

 

Once you register those DLL's the adminpak seems to work fine.  Please leave a comment if you find any more issues using the Adminpak. 

 

This solution probably isn't entirely supported but seems to work.

 

Thanks for reading!

 

*UPDATE*

The official supported method of getting the Adminpak working can be found here: https://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx/kb/930056