Operations Manager 2007 agents and WMI

Operations Manager 2007 R2 agent is a service that uses the Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI) class to query information about the computer it run under very frequently. the agent uses WMI to discover the server roles and to run scripts to verify the health of the server.
to improve the agent reliability  it’s important to keep the WMI repository with best health. To do so Microsoft released several updates that can help us.

Windows Server 2003:

KB933061 – This hotfix is available for Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI) in Microsoft Windows Server 2003. This hotfix improves the stability of the WMI repository. The hotfix includes many of the improvements that are available in WMI in Windows Vista.
Generally, corruption issues can be defined as cases in which the following conditions are true:

• Data that is expected in the repository is missing.
• The missing data cannot be retrieved or added back to the repository

x86 – http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=94CE776E-A4DA-4937-B2FA-3EC16495222E&displaylang=en

x64 – http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=7D75CC01-7673-4884-ADF8-6AFB7E598D42&displaylang=en

KB950681 – WMI & %PATH% more than 1024 chars for windows server 2003

KB955360 – CSCRIPT 5.7 to keep the scripts that uses WMI to run with less errors and fails.

Windows Server 2008 R2

There are 2 WMI hotfixes for 2008 R2 OS, the first one against memory leak and the other when the agent having problems to query a failover cluster.

An application or service that queries information about a failover cluster by using the WMI provider may experience low performance or a time-out exception.
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/974930

The "Win32_Service" WMI class leaks memory in Windows Server 2008 R2.
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/981314

I recommend to apply those hotfixes to all agents, BUT before, you must test them at your environment!!!

I also recommend the following hotfixes:

KB981263 – Management servers or assigned agents unexpectedly appear as unavailable in the Operations Manager console in Windows Server 2003 or Windows Server 2008. This issue occurs because the database that is used by the health state is corrupted. This database corruption is caused by an issue in the storage engine of the jet database that is hosted on Windows.