SharePoint 2010 Error: Failed to call GetTypes on assembly Microsoft.Office.InfoPath.Server

If you happened to have the latest Microsoft Office installed (Go Metro!) alongside SharePoint 2010, you’re going to have a bad time sooner or later.

I recently encountered a strange error whilst updating SMTP settings on Central Administration:

Failed to call GetTypes on assembly Microsoft.Office.InfoPath.Server, Version=14.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=71e9bce111e9429c. Could not load file or assembly ‘Microsoft.Office.InfoPath, Version=15.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=71e9bce111e9429c’ or one of its dependencies. The system cannot find the file specified.

The error obviously made no sense to me whatsoever (kudos to Microsoft), so after a few Google searches, I found a get-around with the problem.

Simply uninstall Microsoft InfoPath.

No need to uninstall anything else from Office, you can keep all the essential Office applications.

Note the emphasis on the “get-around“, as I believe it is not a solution when you have to uninstall a potentially useful program just to run another. I’d love to say “let’s wait for Microsoft to fix this!” but the chance is that we might have to wait for a while before anything will be put to action. Downgrading your Office version would also be a possible solution as I’d experienced no conflicts prior to the upgrade.

Hope this helps!