After a coworker installed SharePoint on an Exchange 2010 server, we received the following error when trying to access the EMC:

“Connecting to remote server failied with the following error message: The WinRM client received an HTTP server error status (500), but the remove service did not include any other informaition about the cause of the failure. For more information, see the about_Remote_Troubleshooting Help topic.

  • CategoryInfo : OpenError: (System.Manageme….RemoteRunspace:RemoteRunspace) [], PSRemotingTransportException
  • FullyQualifiedErrorId: PSSessionOpenFailed”

ESM gave this error:

“Connecting to remote server failied with the following error message: The WinRM client received an HTTP server error status (500), but the remove service did not include any other informaition about the cause of the failure. For more information, see the about_Remote_Troubleshooting Help topic. It was running the command ‘Discover-ExchangeServer -UseWIA $true -SuppressError $true’.”

We were unable to rebuild the directories using PowerShell. The Exchange Management Troubleshooter didn’t fix it. The common resolutions are all over the web but all refer back to Kerberos/Windows Authentication, an environmental variable, .NET modules, and so on but none worked for me. I troubleshot for hours with no luck.

If they don’t work, check the web.config file in c:\inetpub\wwwroot. A default file is way less than 1k — I think that mine was something like 500 bytes — but this one was 12k. The issue was that SharePoint modified it very heavily because during install, the default IIS options were not modified and it tried to install to the Default Website on port 80. Renamed this to oldweb.config, copied in the fresh one from my server, IISRESET, and we were good as new.

Hope this helps someone out.