Error 800401F3 with MSWC.AdRotator in Classic ASP

Fixing error 800401F3 in Classic ASP when using MSWC.AdRotator in Server.createObject

Published: December 01, 2014
Words: 168
Reading time: 1 minutes

I’ve recently been migrating a load of stuff from an old IIS 6, Windows Server 2003 to a brand new box running Windows Server 2012 and IIS 8.5+. One if the things to migrate was an app running using an Access database. Aside from the usual Access permissions problem I also ran across this error: 800401F3 “Server.createObject failed" on the line Server.createObject(“MSWC.AdRotator").

I had no idea what this meant but after a bit of searching, I found this answer on StackOverflow: http://stackoverflow.com/a/20692585/486434. Which involves copying adrot.dll onto the new server and registering it. Thankfully I could get hold of the dll as I still had the old server. So I put it into C:\Windows\SysWOW64 then it was a case of running the command:

%systemroot%\\syswow64\\regsvr32 %systemroot%\\syswow64\\adrot.dll

I didn’t run into permission errors but the answer talks about granting permissions to Anonymous Login on the dll itself.

Hopefully someone else might find this helpful when migrating a legacy, Classic ASP app to a newer server.