Failed to create object Altiris.SoftwaeUpdateAgent: The object is not registered or is not present in the policy (-2147467237)

I have been continually having this error message occur indescriminately on servers that I have installed the Altiris agent.  I have checked out all the Symantec Articles and blogged fixes with no solution.

So I did some investigation...God Love SysInternal tools. I have windows 2008 r2 SP1 servers and I found that in the registry key value "MachineGuid" was missing from

HKLM\software\Altiris\Altiris Agent\Plugin Objects\Agents\SMFAgent

It was however in HKLM\software\Altiris\Altiris Agent\Plugin Objects\Agents\InvAgent.

So just duplicate the value in HKLM\software\Altiris\Altiris Agent\Plugin Objects\Agents\SMFAgent and then restart the Altiris agent.

Hope this helps someone else.