Veeam Backup & Replication, job fails with message “Cannot register management service … VeeamVssSupport”

Last week, I encountered a situation where one of the VMs in a Veeam Backup & Replication job failed time after time. The Job summary showed this message:

The essential part of this Error message:

Starting guest agent
Cannot register management service. Service name: [VeeamVssSupport].
Cannot create service. Machine: [<IP address>]. Service name: [VeeamVssSupport].
Service binary path: [C:\WINDOWS\VeeamVssSupport\VeeamGuestAgent.exe].
Service account: [].
Cannot create service.
Win32 error: The specified service has been marked for deletion.
Code: 1072

It always surprises me that this kind of messages, contain a lot of useful information and how bad I (and I assume a lot of other people) tend to read the content.

That said, it is time to have a look at the VM in question, open the Services applet and find this one:

Windows has already changed the Startup type in “Disabled” and the Service Status is “Stopped”. Investigating the folder  C:\WINDOWS, you will notice that the folder “VeeamVssSupport” and the executable “VeeamGuestAgent.exe” no longer exist. VeeamVssSupport seems some kind of helper service and  will be uninstalled after finishing its job. As the error message states “Win32 error: The specified service has been marked for deletion.”, Windows seems unable to finish the last part of the job. For the same reason, subsequent backup jobs fail to reinstall the service and the backup job will fail.

How to solve this?
My first idea was, open the Registry Editor and remove the service entry. Unfortunately that did not work. Some blog posts advice similar actions, all without result. The official Microsoft approach is to reboot the server. Because the affected service has been marked for deletion, it was gone after the reboot.

And yes, the first backup job after the reboot was successful.

If you have any comments or remarks, please feel free to respond. Happy reading.