Note: This fix requires you to manually delete items from an internal SharePoint table. I strongly encourage you to tread lightly here. Make a backup of all the tables first. You really want to avoid bypassing the WSS API, butin this case, I had no choice:
I ran into a strange issue the other day trying to remove a WFE from a MOSS 2007 farm. I went through the usual steps of removing the machine from the farm through the SharePoint Configuration Wizard and uninstalled SharePoint.
Within the Central Administration / Operations / Servers in Farm, the server I just removed showed up as Not configured so I selected Remove Server only to receivethe error (paraphrasing):
Remove failed: An object in the SharePoint administrative framework depends on other objects which do not exist. Ensure that all of the objects dependencies are createdand retry this operation
(Remove failed: Operation aborted (Exception from HRESULT: 0×80000007):
The conflict occurred in database SharePoint_Config, table “dbo.Objects”, column ‘ParentId’. An object in the SharePoint administrative framework depends on other objects which do not exist.
The problem turned out to be an orphaned reference to the Microsoft Single Sign On Service that was once configured for MOSS (it isn’t being used anymore). The stray reference was in the dbo.Dependencies table within the SharePoint_Config database.
To find the problem, I looked up the GUID for the server I was trying to remove:
SELECT * FROM Objects WHERE Name = ‘servername’
Then took that GUID and looked up any references to it in the Dependencies table:
select * from Dependencies where ObjectId = ‘guid’
The Dependencies table is simply a relationship table that maps GUIDs of items from the Objects table. So taking the relationship ID returned from the above query, I looked that item up in the Objects table and found it pointed to a entry for the “SSOSRV” service.
I decided that this was the problem and went ahead and manually deleted the item from the Dependencies table:
delete from Dependencies WHERE ObjectId = ‘guid’
I was able to finally remove the server from the farm.
