XML Parsing Error at line XXXXX char : Operation Aborted: MaxXMLSize constraint violated

Been a while since I last posted but ran into an issue today that had everyone confused as it quite a tricky one to track down. There had been a number of changes in the environment over the last few weeks so each and every one one of them was examined in microscopic detail. Let me explain…

We started to see a few hundred or so machines start to fail on a certain application (actually it was just a simple Powershell script packaged as an application) during the OSD build task sequence. As it happens this app was part of a nested TS but this is probably irrelevant. In any case, some machines were fine, others were failing. Nobody had touched the app in any way for several months.

After much digging and many red herrings, tucked away in the SMSTSLOG.log was the following message :

XML Parsing Error at line 473689 char 52: Operation Aborted: MaxXMLSize constraint violated.

The cause of this error was down to ‘too much policy’. Basically the affected machines had a lot of Defender Updates deployed to them and it was essentially too much for the machines to handle. Once removed everything started to work again.

If you’re pulling your hair out and can’t figure out why something is failing, then there are thousands of possibilities, admittedly. But it might be worth a quick search for the words XML Parsing Error.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.