Do not delete your old Client Settings! (If copies exist) – System Center 2012 R2 Configuration Manager

Issue: Hardware inventory selections are lost in a copied client setting if you delete the original client setting that it was copied from.

Resolution: Currently Microsoft is aware of the bug and there is no news on a fix as of yet. Because of the level of effort for the code change we may even have to wait for a future release of ConfigMgr instead of a CU.

Workaround: Don’t delete an old (original) client setting if copies of it exist or create your client settings from scratch.

Steps to reproduce:

1. Use your WBEMTEST or PowerShell or your favorite WMI-browsing tool.
   Connect to namespace \\SiteServer\ROOT\SMS\site_CMP and query for the instances of the class SMS_InventoryReport. In my case there is

   
   These are unique pointers to the hardware inventory classes you selected in Hardware Inventory of your Client Settings.

   To see the list of selected classes run this query (Thanks Russ Rimmerman!):

   select a.DataItemID,b.SMSClassID,a.Filter,a.Timeout from DataItem a inner join InventoryClass b on a.ClassID=b.ClassID where a.ActionID=N'<InventoryReportID>’  ORDER BY SMSCLassID

2. Let’s create a new Client Setting and call it (for lack of a better term) “Testing Copy Issue”

   

3. Now we see a new InventoryReportID.

   

4. Copy the “Testing Copy Issue” Client Setting. We can see that no new InventoryReportID is created. It’s still the same list of instances!

   

5. Delete the original “Testing Copy Issue” client setting, while still leaving the copy intact. This results in the deletion of the InventoryReportID instance that the old and new Client Setting is dependent on.

6. The impact is that now the console crashes when you try and enumerate the selected Hardware Inventory Classes in any Client Setting that was copied from the original client setting that was deleted. Also if you deploy the client setting it may drop all of your hardware inventory settings that are not in the Default Client Setting already. as was experienced by me.

   

I’ve filed the bug on connect so if you want to watch the status it is at: https://connect.microsoft.com/ConfigurationManagervnext/feedback/details/1176616. Again, no fix yet. Just a workaround to not delete obsolete client settings that may have copies of it or create your client settings from scratch.