The requested Performance Counter is not a custom counter, it has to be initialized as ReadOnly

This is a case of poor choice of error messages. What it really means is that the Performance Object Category does not exist. The solution is to load the performance counters from the source DLL. In the .Net case, this means running InstallUtil on the file in question. For older perfmon objects, use Lodctr.

Technical details:

If you attempt to load a performance counter with this code (existing Performance Object, non-existant counter):

PerformanceCounter newCounter = new PerformanceCounter("RealCategory","BogusName","Foo",true);

You'll get the very helpful error message: "Counter 'BogusName' does not exist in the specified Category."

If you use this code (non-existant Performance Object):

PerformanceCounter newCounter = new PerformanceCounter("BogusCategory","BogusName","Foo",true);

You'll get a slightly less helpful error message: "Category does not exist." . . . hmm . . would have been nice to know which category.

Now if you use that same call, but flip the readonly flag to false

PerformanceCounter newCounter = new PerformanceCounter("BogusCategory","BogusName","Foo",false);

You get this very unhelpful message: "The requested Performance Counter is not a custom counter, it has to be initialized as ReadOnly."

The trick at this point is figuring out who's trying to load a counter, and which one they're trying to load. The following code will locate a PerformanceCounterInstaller within an assembly, given a filename. Easy enough to list all the DLLs in a given space with DIR /S /B *.DLL, then run InstallUtil on the ones that turn up positive.

  System.Reflection.Assembly assy = System.Reflection.Assembly.LoadFile(fileName);
  Type[] publicTypes = assy.GetExportedTypes();
  foreach (Type t in publicTypes)
  {
    if (t.BaseType.Name == "Installer")
    {
      Installer o = (Installer)t.Assembly.CreateInstance(t.FullName);
      foreach(Installer i in o.Installers)
      {
        if (i.GetType().Name == "PerformanceCounterInstaller")
        {
          MessageBox.Show("Performance Counter Installer Found in Assembly " + fileName);
        }
      }
    }
  }