Today I had the challenge of joining a Vista x64 computer to an SBS 2003 domain. Okay, not a straightforward thing and there is some patching needed before Vista can be joined to an SBS 2003 domain. However that was not the issue today, as it wasn't the first Vista machine to be joined to this domain. The SBS 2003 Server already received the 926505 patch (which was needed to get the first Vista x64 into the domain). However this time upon trying to join a Vista x64 machine, this error came up.
Your computer could not be joined to the domain because the following error has occurred:
The remote procedure call failed and did not execute.
And nothing in the eventlogs of either the Vista machine or the SBS-box! Also, after receiving this error, the computer account for the Vista machine is disabled in AD.
A bit of Googling showed the failing RPC might very well be a firewall issue, not specific to SBS and applicable to both Microsoft ISA and CheckPoint (see 899148). Not that this was the issue right now as ISA was running SP2 and SP1 is said to resolve the issue. But it was the hint I needed, knowing that the ISA Server 2004 was put on the SBS box after the first Vista machine was joined to the domain... To sum it up, the issue is 917903 and is solved in rollup update 930414.
CAUTION!!! After applying the 930414 patch, likely your Exchange Routing Engine, Simple Mail Transport Protocol and World Wide Web Service are stopped and publications (HTTP, HTTPS and SMTP) could be failing too.
But I did join the Vista machine to the SBS domain!
UPDATE(2007-03-15), applying the 930414 patch solved the problem where Outlook loses connection to the Exchange server, then keeps asking for a password, without restoring connection.