Holy moly this problem used to plague me-- or "Update conflict has occured..."

During the final chapters of the book, I occasionally would run into an error when making changes to AAM or adding a subsite; "An update conflict has occurred, and you must re-try this action." Nothing I did seemed to fix it. Because I was really, really desperate to meet my deadlines and didn't have time to deeply troubleshoot anything at that point, I just gave up on that action on that VM, shut it down, opened a different set, and continue work from there.

After the book I immediately started revising courseware for Microsoft, so I didn't get a chance to catch my breath and try to troubleshoot anything. Following that, I immediately needed to prep for a conference, at which I came down with pneumonia, and well, now here I am.

Meanwhile, MS has just come out with a revised version of KB article 939308, which finally mentions the problem and its solution.

Bottom line? "This issue occurs if the contents of the file system cache on the front-end servers are newer than the contents of the configuration database."

Mind you, MS is assuming this problem is occuring only when a configuration database has been recovered and that's why it's out of date. But, it has happened to me on slow networks as well.

So what is the fix? Clear the file system cache on all servers, of course. Yeah, it's a pain, but it at least gets everyone back on the same page.

For more details visit KB article 939308 http://support.microsoft.com/kb/939308/.

So now I know (and you do too).