One of our servers suddenly decided it couldn’t load Server manager, we received the following error:

MMC Couldn’t not create the snap-in.  The snap-in might not have been installed correctly.
Name: Server manager
CLSID: FX:{18ea3f92-d6aa-41d9-a205-2023400c8fbb}

This is related to a .NET issue, a lot of solutions pointed me to renaming the machine.config file to machine.config.old and restarting, the file can be found in:

  •   C:WindowsMicrosoft.NETFramework64v2.0.50727CONFIG

or

  •   C:WindowsMicrosoft.NETFrameworkv2.0.50727CONFIG

However whilst this fixed the server manager issue it produced a secondary error which stopped SQL Server Management Studio loading as it could not find the registered servers:

Unable to read the list of previously registered servers on this system.  Re-register your servers in the “Registered Servers”

I found that SQL Server Management Studio also references the machine.config file and by renaming it, it could not locate the host server.  To solve the issue I naviaged back to the machine.config file location copied and renamed the machine.config.default file to machine.config and voila both Server Manager and SQL Server Management Studio load correctly.

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