WSS 3.0 – The language is not supported on the server

I don’t know why I decided to reconfigure WSS 3.0 on a test server, but something went wrong and I had to uninstall and then reinstall Windows SharePoint Services 3.0. Since the uninstall, for some reason, didn’t finish successfully, I went to the registry and I removed a couple of entries. After rebooting the server, I reinstall WSS and then time came to run the configuration wizard.

Well….

Things weren’t that simple. The wizard could not pass step 2 (where it creates the configuration database). The interesting part is that when I run SQL Server Management Studio, the configuration database was listed there. I went ahead and dropped the database and re-run the configuration wizard. Same problem. The error was:

“Failed to create the configuration database. An exception of type Microsoft.SharePoint.SPException was thrown. Additional exception information: The language is not supported on the server.”

It seems some of the entries I removed from the registry were required. To make the long story short, I spend sometime searching for answer and I found out that the following entry was required in the registry:

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Shared Tools\Web Server Extensions\12.0\ServerLanguage]

with key value “1033″=”"

After that the configuration completed and new the server is functional again.