NServiceBus problems with RavenDb

I work on a .NET application that uses NServiceBus. Under the hood, NServiceBus uses RavenDb for persisting data and state. I hadn’t needed to work on this part of the application for a while, but today I needed to get NServiceBus up and running again.

Unfortunately it wouldn’t work. NServiceBus kept crashing out with the error:

Exception when starting endpoint, error has been logged. 
Reason: Guid should contain 32 digits with 4 dashes (xxxxxxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxxxxxxxxxx).

What had happened since I had last run NServiceBus last. Ah yes, Windows 10…

I decided to reinstall the RavenDb Windows service. You can do this relatively easily by opening a command prompt in the RavenDb folder where the raven.server.exe file lives and typing these two lines:

raven.server.exe -uninstall
raven.server.exe -install

There was also another error being raised internally:

NServiceBus performance counter for Critical Time not set up correctly. 
Please run the NServiceBus infrastructure installers to rectify this problem

Because we are using NServiceBus v3 rather than v4 (upgrading our application would more than likely be painful and currently it just works - never touch a running system and all that), I checked the RavenDb version support. A colleague was running build 2910, so I decided to do the same.

After installing RavenDb again the initial problem was still apparent and a bit of Googling led me to a StackOverflow post about corrupted NServiceBus performance counters.

After rebuilding the performance counters using lodctr /R, everything started working again. Note that if you are on 64 bit Windows, you’ll need to run that command under syswow64 and not system32.

PS C:\Windows\system32> cmd
Microsoft Windows [Version 6.2.9200]
(c) 2012 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.

C:\Windows\system32>lodctr /R

Error: Unable to rebuild performance counter setting from system backup store, error code is 2
C:\Windows\system32>cd ..

C:\Windows>cd syswow64

C:\Windows\SysWOW64>lodctr /R

Info: Successfully rebuilt performance counter setting from system backup store
C:\Windows\SysWOW64>winmgmt.exe /RESYNCPERF

Happy NServiceBus-ing…