What does HRESULT 0x80010136 (CO_E_FAILEDTOGENUUID) mean?

 
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CO_E_PATHTOOLONG CO_E_FAILEDTOCREATEFILE

CO_E_FAILEDTOGENUUID

COM could not generate a UUID for access-control persistence

CO_E_FAILEDTOGENUUID is HRESULT 2147549494 (0x80010136) from winerror.h. AllStat describes it as “Unable to generate a uuid.” In the COM IAccessControl, DCOM client identity, trustee translation, token inspection, security descriptor, ACL, or serialization workflow, the code identifies a specific failure boundary and should not be replaced by a generic COM exception.

Telemetry should preserve this result as a separate outcome rather than merging it with unrelated COM or WinRT failures.

Decisive interpretation boundary

Before choosing recovery, verify that the UUID API result, RPC runtime state, system health, and collision-handling path are captured. That boundary prevents this result from being misclassified as corruption, network failure, or a reason for an unsafe automatic retry.

Also confirm that all observed objects, tokens, buffers, proxies, metadata files, or ACLs belong to the current operation generation and were not retained from an earlier attempt.

Where it is encountered

  • This result can be returned during IAccessControl initialization, access checks, owner/trustee processing, and serialized ACL persistence. Record the interface, method, component version, thread, apartment, process, and correlation ID.
  • This result can be returned during server-side DCOM impersonation, client blanket inspection, token and SID lookup.
  • It can be returned during security descriptor construction, DACL canonicalization, file-backed policy storage, or legacy NetAccess migration.

The immediate focus for it is creation of a unique identifier for serialization files, access-control objects, or temporary state. Keep it attached to that operation; the same numeric severity outside the owning API does not supply enough context.

Correct handling and recovery

Treat identifier generation as a hard precondition, repair runtime or entropy failures, and never substitute timestamps or predictable counters for security-sensitive identity.

An unchanged retry loop for it can duplicate effects, deepen reentrancy, or hide an invalid lifetime transition.

Difference from nearby HRESULTs

It precedes file creation; CO_E_FAILEDTOCREATEFILE means an identifier or path was available but opening storage failed.

The distinction around it should be represented explicitly in control flow and operational dashboards.

Lifetime, retry, and cleanup rules

After it, determine whether the current object, interface pointer, call context, token, stream, metadata reader, asynchronous operation, or access-control instance remains valid. Release only resources owned by the failing attempt, cancel callbacks through their documented mechanism, and avoid double close, double commit, repeated activation, or replay of a non-idempotent remote method.

The retry policy for it should state the trigger, maximum attempts, cancellation owner, and reconciliation step for effects that may have completed elsewhere.

Developer and administrator guidance

When it crosses native, managed, scripting, RPC, or WinRT projection boundaries, preserve the unsigned 32-bit HRESULT. Unit tests for it should assert the code-specific postcondition and resource ownership, not merely that an exception was thrown.

Change the smallest component, identity, ACL, package, or threading boundary that the evidence identifies, then reproduce the same operation. Define who owns retry, cancellation, cleanup, policy changes, package repair, and user-facing messaging for it.

Practical scenario

An access-control save cannot obtain a UUID and therefore does not create a shared temporary filename. Diagnostics capture the native RPC status.

A regression test should reproduce it, assert the raw HRESULT and all relevant outputs, then correct only the decisive condition and verify the intended success or neighboring failure result.

References

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