Rule Name: PerfMonCounterNotCorruptedCheck
Rule Description: Checks if existing performance counter registry hive is consistent.
Message/Corrective Action: The performance counter registry hive is corrupted. To continue, you
must repair the performance counter registry hive. For more
information, see http://support.microsoft.com/kb/300956.

Obviously, I checked out the support-site and followed the instructions step by step. Unfortunately, without any luck. As a result, I continued looking for other reasons why the system configuration check could fail. After a couple of minutes I found a post from Rafael Candido which amongst other things linked to another post from Chris Torng on the Connect site from Microsoft.

As written in Rafael’s post, I copied the code snippet into the Forms1.cs file of a newly created Windows.Forms application. Below please find the code I used to evaluate it:

using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.ComponentModel;
using System.Data;
using System.Drawing;
using System.Text;
using System.Windows.Forms;
using System.Globalization;

namespace WindowsApplication3
{
public partial class Form1 : Form
{
public Form1 ()
{
InitializeComponent ();
}

private void Form1_Load (object sender, EventArgs e)
{
string test = string.Format (“{0,3}”, CultureInfo.InstalledUICulture.Parent.LCID.ToString (“X”)).Replace (” “, “0”);
MessageBox.Show (test);
}
}
}

The result told me to look at Perflib code “007” in the registry (HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESOFTWAREMicrosoftWindows NTCurrentVersionPerflib07). I then copied both registry keys (Counter/Help) from “009” and re-run the system configuration check.

Finally, it succeeded and I was able to install MS SQL Server 2008 RC0.