I’m at what I hope to be the tail end of a long, and I mean loooong, drawn out Sharepoint Services Upgrade. I’ve been using 2.0 forever, and want to upgrade to 3.0 to support Office 2007, as well as to get on the newer version.

Well, I finally had a successful migration in my test environment! Yay! Now, I’ll just wipe it all out, try it again, just to make sure it wasn’t a fluke.

Here’s where I run into the problem. After uninstalling everything, and then re-installing Sharepoint Team Services 2, I received the error below:

Extend Virtual Server : The server administration programs and the extended virtual server for Windows SharePoint Services on this Web server are not compatible. Ensure that the administration program is the same version as the virtual server.

That’s what I saw whether I was trying to access the Central administration, or if I was using STSADM to try and perform an operation.

It turned out that I had to manually go into the wwwroot folder for the site, and delete the contents. Although I had uninstalled Sharepoint Team Services 3 and 2, not to mention ISS, none of the uninstall programs ever cleaned out the directory. So when I was installing the older version, it saw the files for the newer version.

After, that, everything installed perfectly.