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Today I wanted to install Exchange Service Pack 3 on my SBS 2008 box. MSKB 982423 says the only thing to worry about is Forefront, which I’m not using. I ran setup.exe as an Administrator. The Readiness checks passed fine. However within a few seconds of starting the upgrade, I got this error:

Unable to remove product with code 6574fdc2-40fc-405a-9554-22d1ce15686b. Error opening installation log file. Verify that the specified log file location exists and that you can write to it. Error code is 1622.

The only option was to click Finish and start looking for answers.
 

Exchange Is Down, Can’t Re-Run Setup

At this point, the service pack setup has stopped and disabled all Exchange services, so your Exchange server is offline. If you re-run setup, the Readiness checks fail with a message that the metabase cannot be accessed. The linked advice is to uninstall and re-install Internet Information Services. (Yeah, right.) So yes, the web server is also offline.

Through some trial and error, and with the help of this Technet article, I found that all I needed to do was re-enable and start these two IIS services:

World Wide Web Publishing Service
IIS Admin Service

With that, when I re-ran the SP3 setup, the Readiness checks passed—and I was back to the upgrade failure:

Manually Uninstall Microsoft Full Text Indexing Engine for Exchange

A little digging in C:\ExchangeSetupLogs\ExchangeSetup.log and I saw that this error occurred when working on MSFTE.MSI. That corresponds to some Internet research that identifies the component as the Microsoft Full Text Indexing Engine for Exchange. I boldly followed the advice in this thread to manually uninstall that component:

MsiExec.exe /X {6574fdc2-40fc-405a-9554-22d1ce15686b}

Then I re-started the two IIS services and re-ran the Exchange SP3 installation.

Worked This Time

This time, the Preparing Setup step finished quickly. I got a bit nervous when the Remove Exchange Files step seemed stuck, but it finally finished after 21 minutes. The entire process took just under 37 minutes. No reboot was requested, and Exchange and the web server are back online.

Google “{6574fdc2-40fc-405a-9554-22d1ce15686b}” and you’ll see that people have been getting this error since Exchange 2007 SP1. If I can uninstall the product from the command line, why can’t the service pack setup uninstall it?

[Source from here]