MMC cannot open the file C:\WINDOWS\system32\compmgmt.msc.
This may be because the file does not exist, is not an MMC console, or was created by a later version of MMC. This may also be because you do not have sufficient access rights to the file.
To debug this particular issue, we turn to Process Monitor. When we start up the app, the first item shown is a filter dialog. For this session, we need to add mmc.exe to the list of processes to monitor.
Though it's useful to see all activity for a given process, we are generally focused on errors. To make this easier, we want to highlight any log entries that do not have a Result of 'SUCCESS'
Once we have Process Monitor configured and running, we can start the Computer Management tool. The logs will quickly fill up with registry and filesystem events, many of which will be highlighted
In the above screenshot, notice the registry ReadOpenKey failures for various items under "HKCR\CLSID\{2933BF90-7B36-11d2-B20E-00C04F983E60}". I don't know off hand what those sub-items specify, but without them I do know you will be unable to load the associated COM object. To determine what dll was at fault, we went to another computer and looked for that section in the registry.
Note above the default value of "C:\WINDOWS\system32\msxml3.dll." For whatever reason, our installer was unregistering this system dll - definitely not a good thing. Fixing the problem on the broken box was as simple as running regsvr32 on msxml3.dll.
