Failed to upgrade SharePoint Products and Technologies - PostSetupConfigurationTaskException

Grr.

A really annoying exception I had while trying to upgrade one of my Moss farms Im working on. The thing is, that I haven't experienced this error in any of the other farms I upgraded before.

What's happened ? I installed the sp2 successfully. Then ran the Configuration Wizard, and In the step 3 out of 4 got this very odd exception :

Failed to upgrade SharePoint Products and Technologies. An exception of type Microsoft.SharePoint.PostSetupConfiguration.PostSetupConfigurationTaskException was thrown.

As you can see it doesn't give you too much of a details. I started to google this issue and came across with a post about this exception.
In that post, it was suggested to stop the World Wide Publishing service of the IIS and to stop all the Sharepoint services you have working on that server ( i.e "Windows SharePoint Services Web Application" and etc ). And only then run the configuration wizard, and then restart the services.

In the first server, I did it this way and it worked like a charm.
On the rest of the servers, I checked it and decided to stop only the "Windows SharePoint Services Web Application" and not any of the IIS services or other Sharepoint services - Because of the long recovery time it took. That worked too. )


So my recommendation to you is just to stop the
" Windows SharePoint Services Web Application"
service. and save yourself the time of stopping all the other services which seems to be unnecessary to be stopped.

Be aware, when you stop that service, all web applications you had on that server ( That you can see in the iis manager ) will be gone, but once you start the service again, it will automatically re-create them and it might take a while depends on how many web applications you have - Though, you should check that they were created well, especially if you don't deploy your solution as MS recommends.

Good Luck upgrading.