ConfigMgr Task Sequence Fails Immediately with "The software could not be found on any servers at this time."

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Happy Monday, fellow ConfigMgr administrators!
I ran across a pretty difficult Task Sequence last week that had me scratching my head.

It involved a pretty complex Task Sequence that contained over 50 applications.

The Task Sequence would fail within 5 seconds upon launch from the Software Center with an message of “The software could not be found on any servers at this time.”

No error code was given.
Unable to make changes to your software "The software could not be found on any servers at this time."

I ended up removing all the apps from the TS and adding them back one at a time. Many of the applications had at least one supersedence, dependencies and dependency chaining.

It turned out there was one particular superseded application that was missing its content!!

Yeah, that would do it.

Unfortunately, ConfigMgr did not log what application or package ID had its content missing so it was a crap shoot trying to find it. 

 I really feel like there should have been a log somewhere that gave this information.
This is the only log information I could find was from the execmgr.log.[IDXXXXXA * IDXXXXXB] Content is not available on the DP for this program. The program cannot be run now.OnOptionalExecutionRequests failed for program * : 0x87d01106

IDXXXXXA and IDXXXXXB were, respectively, the Task Sequence ID and the Task Sequence Deployment ID. 
Error 0x87d01106 means “Failed to verify the executable file is valid or to construct the associated command line."

Not really an applicable error to this situation...but I digress…

I was able to replicate this in my lab on MEM 2002. The customer I was working with had MEM 1910 with all hotfixes applied.

This article does mention that if content is missing from a superseded app, the Task Sequence will fail. However, there is no way to correlate the failure back to the article because the article does not mention the error message or error code.
  
The article also says having the superseded app set as “retired” or using the “Install Behavior” feature of an app will cause the entire Task Sequence to fail.

Specify the executable files that must be closed by the user for available deployments, or closed automatically for required deployments in order for the application installation to succeed.

While this is true (that the Task Sequence will fail), in my testing, the errors for these two situations were different than the error above.

First of all, the Task Sequence does not fail until it reaches the Application section where the troublesome Applications are located.

"has failed with the error code 0x80004005."

The GUI listed the error codes as 80004005. Everyone’s favorite “unspecified error”!

At least in these two cases, the errors were more meaningful (and there was actually an smsts.log unlike in the case above):

From the SMSTS.LOG:
Can not find that the group (Apps) has been started. Invalid instruction table. Error 0x80004005
Failed to execute an end group instruction. Error 0x(80004005)
Fatal error is returned in execution of the action (Apps) (0x80004005)
An error (0x80004005) is encountered in execution of the task sequence

Hopefully, someone will find some useful information in this post.
Thanks!
John

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