So all my friends have been playing with Groove for about a month and I never joined the party. Frankly, I never could get Groove to work. I had a few hours to kill today so I figured I’d finally get this thing fixed and having been over a month since I last tried to get it to work I figured I’d take a shortcut (ie: IM to sbradcpa: “Hey, whats with ‘can’t find provisioning server’ thing in Groove) from which point I was redirected to PSS Canada. Apparently Dana had the same problem and the PSS reference is important for two reasons: First, it took him 20 minutes to answer my IM, followed by “They don’t have Google search in America?” and “I have to go, but if you have a problem later I’ll help again, SRX07…”

So what made me so “special” – well, apparently my antivirus software wasn’t playing along. I couldn’t get my Groove on (I know, I know) because I have a 64bit Vista workstation with way too much RAM and I can’t get a decent A/V solution for that so I have to deal with the third world software makers (ESET).

Bottom line — ESET/NOD32 hates GROOVE.EXE. If you’ve got the combo and you’re getting the “Groove 2007: Unable to contact provisioning server” you need to add GROOVE.EXE to the IMON exception list. Details here..

It’s all in the Relay Server URL configuration (which Groove gets on it’s own, its not modifiable as are other parameters on your Advanced Network Settings). Because Groove is being intercepted by IMON you’re not getting to the relay server and are instead stuck with the grooveDNS://backwardscompatibility.groove.net – but add GROOVE.EXE to the exception list and voila, you’re set with a *relay.groove.microsoft.com relay server.

As for NOD32. Open up your Control Panel > IMON > Setup > Miscelaneous > Exclusion > Edit > Add > C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Office\Office12\GROOVE.EXE

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