SharePoint 2007 - Errors after patch deployment

Recently we started seeing the following errors appearing in our SharePoint 2007 environment and sites not able to be created.:

• The element 'FormTemplatesList' of type 'ListInstance' for feature 'IPFSWebFeatures' (id: a0e5a010-1329-49d4-9e09-f280cdbed37d) threw an exception during activation: Operation aborted (Exception from HRESULT: 0x80004004 (E_ABORT))

• Failed to activate template-associated site-collection-scoped features for template 'STS#0' in site

• Failed to apply template "STS#0" to web at URL 

• Feature Activation: Failed to ensure feature dependencies for feature 'PublishingSite

• Feature Activation: Failed to ensure feature dependencies for feature 'PremiumSite'

In our environment  by mistake one of the servers in the farm had a latest patch downloaded to it - in this case 12.0.0.6565 - and the rest of the servers were on 12.0.0.6545. However we were not aware the patch had been deployed to the above errors were the only indication something had changed in the farm as via CA it still displayed the old version number.


Out first thought was to run the wizard on the affected servers which proceeded in upgrading the server to the patch and then also all the content databases in the farm .... not ideal and against all Microsoft best practices. Once we realised there was no way to roll back we upgraded the rest of the farm and the errors above disappeared.


Its seems the errors were around mismatches in dlls