The BITS job list is not in a recognized format. It may have been created by a different version of BITS. The job list has been cleared.

Can anyone advise on this, please? (All the XP machines are patched to SP1; the 2000 ones to SP3.)

Contributed By: Mahmood Dhalla [MSFT]
This should not happen when you upgrade from older versions of BITS to BITS 1.5. This kind of error message would be expected on a system where BITS was downgraded to an older version and the older version was loaded.

On a test machine where you can reproduce this error:

Run the following commands to enable BITS logging on the client machines.

set BitsKey=HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\BITS
reg add %BitsKey% /v LogFileFlags /t REG_DWORD /d 0xfbcf /f
reg add %BitsKey% /v LogFileSize /t REG_DWORD /d 20 /f

After this restart BITS. Restart of BITS can be accomplished by the following commands

net stop bits
net start bits

Then install BITS 1.5 on this machine.