Demote 2003 Domain Controller: NETLOGON Timeout

As you may know, I occasionally copy information here which I feel needs better exposure on the web. This is just such a post.

I recently tried to demote a server 2003 domain controller (using dcpromo), and hit the following error message:

The operation failed because:

Failed to configure the service NETLOGON as requested

"The wait operation timed out"

This is a particularly useless message because the actual problem has nothing to do with netlogon.

I corrected this problem by modifying the TCP/IP settings to point DNS at the remaining domain controller (e.g. remove 127.0.0.1 or any other IP which points to the machine being demoted).