Retrieving the COM Class Factory for Component with CLSID...Failed Due to the Following Error: 80040154

Introduction

As the title tells the story, this tip is about solving the error 80040154 which is thrown while retrieving a COM component in a web application hosted in IIS 7.

Background

I was working in an Email Marketing App where a module was built on top of a COM component that takes snapshots of the rendered HTML email from FCK editor and saves a thumbnail image. The project was developed in Visual Studio 2010 and everything compiles and run without any issue.

After deploying the application in IIS (IIS 7 in my case), I got this strange error which was not descriptive enough to give any lead. After doing a considerable amount of Googling, it took me nowhere. Because, people are getting the same error for variety of reasons. With no good luck and as I was dealing with web application, I decided to tune different settings in IIS.

Solution

In my case, the solution was pretty simple. I noticed that in the advanced setting of the application pool used by my web app, there is a flag called Enable 32-bit Application which was set to False by default. Of course, the com component causing the problem was also 32 bit. So, I set the flag to True. After restarting the IIS, I ran the application again and voila!