software

While I did not aim for it, it was a little disappointing to learn that I got soooooo close to hitting #350000.

Not sure that I have enough of it, but I can try anyway. Here's one for the unlucky administrators who have an Exchange server amidst their server farm.
If a windows server running Exchange 2003 logs the following error event in the System log when it is restarted:

Access denied attempting to launch a DCOM Server. The server is:
{9DA0E106-86CE-11D1-8699-00C04FB98036}
The user is SYSTEM/NT AUTHORITY, SID=S-1-5-18.

then one possible cause is that the Microsoft Search service is missing a startup dependency on the Exchange Information Store – which is not obvious from anything in the event message or the surrounding ones. Searching the web does not list anything relevant at first either, you have to check lower ranked results to find the solution listed in the post by user "zeeshan_xt" in this message board thread. Hopefully this post helps it move up a bit.