Yesterday I spent three hours troubleshooting a distributed transaction problem – ASP.NET just gave me a E_FAIL – which was not very helpful. After testing the connection with DTCPing – I got the message that both machines have the same CID value (a GUID identifying the DTC instance) – this was – well – understandable – as both machines are linked VMWare clones.

To get a new CID value for a machine run

msdtc -uninstall
msdtc -install

and reboot. At least this solved my problems..