SBS 2003 Server CEICW Fails at Firewall Configuration

I was working on a customers Small Business Server 2003 system this week and had a problem where Remote Web Workplace had stopped working, a check on the ISA 2004 console showed that the publishing rules were all gone!  It appeared they may have been inadvertently deleted.

So the best plan with SBS Server 2003 is to use the Internet connection Wizard to reset all the publishing rules, SBS kind of likes you to use the wizards even if you can configure the ISA manually.

However whenever I ran the wizard it would fail at the Firewall configuration stage, I used the BPA to check the server and worked on my event logs until they were clean of errors but still it would fail.

So what was the cause?  Well it turns out that having a Web Listener in the ISA objects was the issue,  I removed the SBS Web Listener and then ran the CEICW and bingo it runs through and recreates my RWW rule and RWW is working again.

This is one with no real reason I feel, one of these Microsoft things were you just have to learn from experience and move on!